By Futurist Thomas Frey
I’m about to make a lot of people in the pharmaceutical industry very uncomfortable. But my job isn’t to protect existing business models—it’s to accurately portray what future generations will demand. And what they’ll demand in healthcare will make today’s system look as outdated as bloodletting.
The Current System is Designed to Fail You
Let’s start with an uncomfortable truth: our current healthcare system isn’t designed to make you healthy. It’s designed to manage your illness profitably.
You don’t get paid for preventing disease. You get paid for treating it. Doctors don’t get reimbursed for the patients who never get sick. Pharmaceutical companies don’t profit from people who don’t need drugs. Hospitals don’t make money from empty beds.
The entire economic engine runs on sickness, not wellness. And Gen Z sees this with crystal clarity.
They watched their parents get prescribed pill after pill—statins for cholesterol, SSRIs for depression, stimulants for focus, sleep aids for insomnia caused by the stimulants. They watched side effects get treated with more pills. They watched their grandparents take a dozen medications daily, each one addressing a symptom while creating new problems.
And they’re asking the most dangerous question in healthcare: What if there’s a completely different approach?
The Optimization Model
Here’s the heretical part: solving healthcare begins with establishing an optimal model of what a person’s health should look like. Not just absence of disease, but true optimization.
Once that model is in place—customized to your genetics, your lifestyle, your environment—the goal becomes coaxing your body into living up to that standard. Not forcing it with pharmaceuticals, but optimizing the systems that already exist.
Rather than dosing the body with statins to lower cholesterol, what if we optimized the body’s natural cholesterol regulation? Rather than antidepressants to boost serotonin, what if we stimulated the body’s natural production through targeted interventions?
This isn’t wishful thinking. It’s systems biology meeting sensor technology meeting AI-powered personalization.
The Toolkit of the Future
Imagine a set of sensors—some wearable, some implantable, some temporary—giving real-time readings of what’s happening inside your body. Not just heart rate and steps, but hormone levels, inflammatory markers, nutrient deficiencies, cellular stress, organ function.
Your AI health system—not a doctor you see twice a year, but a system monitoring you constantly—notices your cortisol is chronically elevated. But instead of prescribing an anxiety medication, it analyzes the patterns.
It notices the cortisol spikes correlate with your evening screen time. It detects you’re low in magnesium. It sees your sleep architecture is disrupted. It notes you’re spending less time outdoors and your Vitamin D is tanking.
The intervention? Not a prescription. A protocol: Reduce blue light after 8 PM. Supplement magnesium. Get 20 minutes of morning sunlight. The system stimulates better melatonin production naturally. Within two weeks, your cortisol normalizes. No pills. No side effects. Just optimization.
The Pharmaceutical Apocalypse
Now multiply that example across every system in the body:
Testosterone low? Instead of lifelong hormone replacement, identify why production dropped. Is it microplastics? Electromagnetic field exposure? Lack of resistance training? Zinc deficiency? Address the root cause, stimulate natural production.
Blood pressure high? Instead of beta blockers, optimize sodium-potassium balance, reduce systemic inflammation, improve arterial flexibility through targeted nutrition and exercise protocols.
Depression? Map your neurotransmitter production, optimize your gut microbiome (where most serotonin is produced), adjust your diet, increase social connection, optimize sleep, get proper light exposure.
The pattern is clear: treat the body as an optimization problem, not a prescription pad.
Zero Vaccines, Zero Pills, All Different
Here’s where I’ll really lose people: this model extends to prevention.
Rather than injecting antigens to trigger immune response, what if we kept the immune system so optimized that it handled threats naturally? Rather than pills for every ailment, what if the body’s regulatory systems worked so well that disease rarely gained a foothold?
I’m not saying this works for everything. Emergency medicine, acute care, trauma—those still need traditional interventions. But for the chronic diseases killing most people? The metabolic syndrome, the autoimmune conditions, the mental health crisis?
Gen Z and Gen Alpha aren’t interested in managing these conditions with pills. They want to prevent them entirely through optimization.
The Adoption Curve
Here’s what happens: The first systems launch, probably outside traditional healthcare. Wellness centers, longevity clinics, direct-to-consumer models. Early adopters pay out of pocket because insurance won’t cover “unproven” approaches.
But then something remarkable happens. The data starts coming in. People using optimization protocols show dramatically lower rates of chronic disease. Their biomarkers improve. Their health span extends.
Gen Z and Gen Alpha, already skeptical of traditional medicine, instantly switch to this routine. They grow up with sensors, AI health coaches, optimization protocols. Taking daily pills seems as backwards to them as smoking seemed to Millennials.
Within a generation, the incidence of major illnesses begins to plummet. Life expectancy doesn’t just increase—health span does. People aren’t living longer while sick. They’re living longer while healthy.
The Resistance
The pharmaceutical industry will fight this viciously. So will traditional healthcare systems built around fee-for-service sick care. The regulatory apparatus will move slowly, demanding decades of studies.
But Gen Z doesn’t care. They’ll build it outside the system. They’ll prove it works. They’ll make the old model obsolete before it can adapt.
This is their revenge for inheriting a healthcare system designed to profit from their suffering rather than optimize their health.
Final Thoughts
I know how this sounds. Revolutionary. Heretical. Maybe naive.
But consider what we’re comparing it to: a system where Americans spend twice as much on healthcare as any other nation and get worse outcomes. Where chronic disease rates climb every year. Where we treat symptoms endlessly rather than addressing root causes.
The optimization model isn’t just different—it’s necessary. And it’s coming, whether the incumbents like it or not.
Because Gen Z isn’t asking permission to revolutionize healthcare. They’re just going to do it. And the rest of us will either adapt or become irrelevant.
The future of healthcare isn’t better pills. It’s no pills. It’s optimization. It’s treating the body like the sophisticated biological system it is, not a broken machine that needs chemical band-aids.
Welcome to the revolution. The pharmaceutical industry won’t like it. But your body will.
Related Stories:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00189-6
