Paul Wolpe, PhD
You may have already heard that last month Emory held its fifth annual predictive health symposium “Human Health: Molecules to Mankind.†Researchers, physicians, health care workers and members of the community from throughout the country met to learn about intriguing research and provocative commentary by health care experts.
One of those experts, Paul Wolpe, director of the Emory Center for Ethics, says health care has changed as more and more aspects of ordinary life or behaviors are being redefined as medical. For example, being drunk and disorderly has become alcoholism. Now, virtually all of life is being redefined in biological terms, he says. And that, says Wolpe, has led to an increase in health care costs. We have an enormous amount of new things that we are calling illness, and we expect our health care system to treat them, he says. “We are creating a new category of disease called pre-symptomatic.â€