As a young man it seemed probable to me that life would become better for everyone. After all, our combined annual budgets in the United States and Europe were enough to make the entire world a better place for everyone.  If we had decided to make it happen, there was enough money for every person to have a home, a car and a job.

Vietnam would be our last war ever.  We would find a substitute for sugar so that we would no longer be overweight.  A replacement for butter, trans fat enhanced margarine, would ease the population away from the epidemic of heart disease, and the cure for cancer as declared by President Nixon, was only a few years away.  Finally, we would have a four day work week and spend quality time with our families.

Thirty years later.  One must wonder just exactly what went wrong?

Daniel E. Koshland Jr in his article the Cha-Cha-Cha Theory of Scientific Discovery describes scientific discoveries as “the steps—some small, some big—on the staircase called progress, which has led to a better life for citizens of the world.”

In its purest sense, Mr. Koshland is absolutely correct in his description.  The problem is that we, as a population, as a species, as a herd, tend to fight change at every level at all times.

In the book “Change or Die” the author, Alan Deutschman, discusses the reality that when cardiologists tell patients with heart disease that they have to “change or die,” nine out of ten fail to switch to healthier lifestyles, 90% of us would knowingly select death rather than change.

Truthfully, when you consider how long we have held onto the outdated, inappropriate practices of the Industrial Revolution, it is fascinating to me that science has evolved at all under the current system, a broken system about which I have written numerous times.

So, we go to the question list:  What can be done to change science?  What can be done to change health care?  What can be done to change man’s inhumanity to man?

Short of a national tragedy, like a pandemic of the avian flu, we continue to embrace old realities that are no longer appropriate.

Collectively, however, we are approaching a major paradigm shift internationally that has been fashioned by the enormous technological advances that our world has been experiencing during the previous decade. Predicated upon the fact that we are now totally and completely tied to each other world wide for the first time in history, this transformation could potentially result in the broadest societal change that the Earth has ever faced.

We are hooked up on multiple levels. From the mountains of Afghanistan to the deserts of Saudi Arabia, from the Arctic to Siberia, our fellow human beings have wireless communication devices that provide contact capacity where it had never existed before.

We now have the ability to commune through the Internet, through cell phones, through Treos and Blackberries with almost anyone anywhere in the world. When teenage kids join each other in chat rooms across continents, nothing goes unchallenged. Regardless if it is the misstatement from leaders, from clergy or from a shock jock, they now have the ability to confirm, verify and validate immediately and completely by tapping some keys or simply calling each other.

This quantity of massive change has resulted in anger, fear and a certain amount of chaos as we struggle to define new pathways in our culture.  All of this is because this connectedness has begun to create new truths and new accountability.

What we have experienced over the past several years has been a reaction to this new world order, a very conservative movement that results from that fact that when life becomes more challenging, we tend to go as far back into our conservative past as we can to find whatever we can attach ourselves to so as to protect our future from change to help us cope with the fear of change.

Let’s hold on for dear life and hope that this potential revolution allows us to change the pursuit of truth through science and to allow our health delivery system to evolve into a useful system more appropriately directed toward chronic illness and prevention.