The Tribune

By JEFFARAH GIBSON

Tribune Features Writer

jgibson@tribunemedia.net

Doing her part to promote a new, 21st century approach to healthcare, Dr Desirée Cox is hosting the second annual HEALinc Future Health Innovation Summit at the Grand Hyatt next month. This year, the focus is on promoting regenerative health.

Founded in 2016 by Rhodes Scholar Dr Cox, HEALinc was created for the purpose of creating new knowledge and advancing innovation in the Caribbean and Latin American region of the Americas. The organisation seeks to offer a platform for innovation and a fast-track test bed for cutting-edge, health-accelerating technologies, as well as access to cellular therapy. The upcoming conference seeks to promote regenerative health for all in a trusted, data-driven environment and ecosystem. It will be held October 2-4.

This year’s summit promises to be a “watershed moment” in shifting the global healthcare industry towards collaborations that increase access to regenerative health wellness technologies.

The 2019 event will feature exhibitions, inspirational and expert presenters, celebrity speakers, workshops and networking events. It will also feature the latest information from top practitioners and scientists on stem cell therapy and other regenerative technologies.

“We, the world, need a new narrative, a new paradigm for health where regenerative health is at the core of health,” Dr Cox told Tribune Health.

“This paradigm for health needs to go beyond the silos of disease specialties, and it needs to include the mind, body, communities, climate change, the impact of stress and work on wellness, and more. The new world view or paradigm also needs to be taught to young people planning on studying anything, not just health, and healthcare professionals who would have been trained in the old, current biomedical paradigm. Achieving this global shift in the conversation around health requires global, cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural and cross-generational collaboration.”

Last year’s inaugural summit attracted close to 500 people.

“ ‘Self-care is healthcare’ is an emerging mandate for regenerative and personal wellness. Advances in technology now make it possible for appropriate healthcare therapies to incorporate ongoing data capture, analysis and education via distributed technology architecture. This fundamental upgrade empowers individuals to take control of their own optimal health and well-being prior to, through illness, and into healing,” Dr Cox.

This vision of promoting holistic healthcare is at the heart of the summit.

“The summit is not just for medical people. Self-care, personal wellness and performance are important aspects of the summit and so it really is for different target groups and we have a number of different strands,” she said.

“But for the medical community locally, doctors can get ACCME credits in regenerative medicine and personal wellness – which is estimated as a multi-trillion dollar industry globally – and there is no other local educational opportunity for this. Furthermore, epigenetics (how our genes are expressed and how that expression changes with climate changes), nutrition and nutrigenomics (how nutrition alters genetic expression), and practical ways we can improve our capacity for resilience, adaptability and regeneration, is part of what doctors will learn about. They need this new knowledge to keep up with the times and better help their clients to stay well, and to be able to copy with the climate changes and modern stresses of our time.”

In a previous interview with The Tribune, Dr Cox said: “Our 10-year HEALinc Future Health vision focuses primarily on preventing illness; our secondary focus is on reversing illness, and our tertiary focus is on treatment. We want to take advantage of the extraordinary times we live in and the vast amount of new knowledge available to us with the exponential growth in science and technology.”

For more information on next month’s summit, visit www.healincfuturehealthsummit.com.