Homeostatic Capacity and Functional Longevity
Homeostasis is a relatively stable state of equilibrium. Homeostatic capacity (or allostatic capacity, buffering capacity, compensatory capacity, or autoregulatory capacity) is the efficiency of an autoregulatory system to maintain functional homeostasis. The interaction of homeostatic capacity and stressors determines health. We envision a model for healthy, functional longevity based on evaluating and improving homeostatic capacity.
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Hiding in Plain Sight: Essays by Joon Yun, MD, Third Edition
Collection of essays on investing, healthcare, and life from the unique perspective of Dr. Joon Yun, a renown investor and thinker. Dr. Yun is President of Palo Alto Investors, LLC, a hedge fund founded in 1989 with over $1 billion in assets under management. Dr. Yun has been a healthcare specialist at the firm for 15 years and has been an early investor in companies that develop drugs and devices for unmet medical needs. Dr. Yun is board certified in Radiology and served on the clinical staff at Stanford Hospital from 2000-2006. He received his B.A. from Harvard College in 1990 and his M.D. from Duke Medical School in 1994. He has served on corporate and nonprofit boards and is a founder of Palo Alto Institute, a nonprofit foundation and think tank. Dr. Yun has published numerous patents as well as medical and business articles. His writing covers several topics, including evolution, investing, and the future of healthcare. Dr. Yun is a contributor to Forbes and Evolution: This View of Life.
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Who Will Be the Modern-Day Copernicus?
In 1439, German blacksmith Johannes Gutenberg introduced the movable type to Europe that enabled mass communication at heretofore unprecedented scale, helping usher in the Early Modern Age. Among the early beneficiaries of the novel printing press was a young student, Nicolaus Copernicus, who amassed a sizable library of astronomy books in Kraków during the late 15th century. His synthesis of the newly liberated information resulted in the publication of Dē revolutionibus orbium coelestium, which transformed a convoluted, geocentric model of planetary motion into the elegant heliocentric model that we have today. Indeed, the conceptual reframing of extant, seemingly abstruse data to explain the revolution of celestial bodies was so radical that the word revolution became synonymous with the now-familiar notion of overthrowing the established system. Dominoes have been falling ever since: the French, American, and Industrial Revolutions, etc.
We are now a quarter century since the Internet was introduced to the world. As profound as the information revolution precipitated by the printing press was, it pales in comparison to the Internet’s knowledge liberation.
Who, then, will be the Copernicus of our time?
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Health 3.0: Lifelong Health: Speech Delivered at the Inaugural Annual Meeting of the National Academy of Medicine
Speech delivered at the inaugural annual meeting of the National Academy of Medicine exhorting the members of the Academy to take the moonshot to re-imagine healthcare through the lens of restoring our innate homeostatic capacity to solve aging and usher in the era of Health 3.0.
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Ebola and Secondhand Stress
Fear is contagious. Natural selection has wired us to sense fear in our surroundings and make it our own. Zebras might not get ulcers from chronic stress but those that fail to activate their acute stress response when others around them are stressed are more likely to miss cues of threat and be consumed by a predator. Absorbing secondhand stress from others is a survival instinct—an adaptation shaped by prehistoric environments to promote evolutionary fitness.
However, our culture is evolving faster than our ability to biologically evolve. Too often, we helplessly rubberneck trainwreck events—often sensationalized by media for attracting attention and profit—despite their remote connection to our personal survival. For example, fear of the Ebola virus in recent weeks has become more viral than the virus itself. In the modern technology age where fear memes can spread around the globe near-instantly, our tendency to absorb secondhand stress from our ubiquitous, 24/7 media culture to activate our own stress response can produce maladaptive responses that are out of proportion to the actual threat.
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Secondhand Stress: It’s Real
You are probably aware of the concept of second-hand smoke, which increases the risk of disease and death. You should probably be aware of another deadly scourge: second-hand stress.
Natural selection has wired us to sense the stress of others and make it our own. If you are a gazelle and you don’t freak out when others around you do, then you might be the one about to be consumed by a predator you haven’t seen yet. Animals detect the stress of others through various sensory signals such as alarm calls, olfactory cues, or visual behaviors. Plants detect distress signals of others in the form of ethylene gas that activates their own stress response (fittingly, second-hand smoke contains ethylene). The ability to detect second-hand stress is a survival instinct that can promote evolutionary fitness.
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Hiding in Plain Sight: Essays by Joon Yun, MD, Second Edition
Collection of essays on investing, healthcare, and life from the unique perspective of Dr. Joon Yun, a renown investor and thinker. Dr. Yun is President of Palo Alto Investors, LLC, a hedge fund founded in 1989 with over $1 billion in assets under management. Dr. Yun has been a healthcare specialist at the firm for 15 years and has been an early investor in companies that develop drugs and devices for unmet medical needs. Dr. Yun is board certified in Radiology and served on the clinical staff at Stanford Hospital from 2000-2006. He received his B.A. from Harvard College in 1990 and his M.D. from Duke Medical School in 1994. He has served on corporate and nonprofit boards and is a founder of Palo Alto Institute, a nonprofit foundation and think tank. Dr. Yun has published numerous patents as well as medical and business articles. His writing covers several topics, including evolution, investing, and the future of healthcare. Dr. Yun is a contributor to Forbes and Evolution: This View of Life.
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Mark to Market: Is an Unrealized Price Gain a Real Asset?
With asset prices plunging, I hear cash is piling up on the sidelines as investors flee the market. These words conjure up the image of a weary blackjack player who has chosen to cash in his chips and sit out the game. Unlike a blackjack table where cash moves among players and the house, market trades move cash from sideline to sideline, not into or out of markets (other than for occasional share offerings or repurchases by companies). Despite the vague feeling that there are no buyers in this market, every dollar “taken out of the market” by a panicked seller is offset by an equal dollar “put into the market” by a buyer. There is essentially no net change of cash on the sidelines even in a falling market. Yet the seductive appeal of this money illusion might be a cornerstone of the current financial crisis and the bubbles that preceded it.
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Who Will Own The Future of Healthcare?
Not long ago, consumers could access health information about as easily as they could access plutonium. This is changing rapidly in the information age. As a result, consumers—rather than doctors, government, insurers, hospitals, or healthcare companies—will own the Healthcare Century. Any healthcare institution that ignores this trend does so at its peril.
Before the information age, consumers were almost entirely beholden to their physicians for information about health and disease. Now, consumers increasingly educate themselves using the Internet to learn about their health, illnesses, and symptoms. Every day, the patient-doctor relationship becomes more of a partnership as patients come up the learning curve.
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Hiding in Plain Sight: Essays by Joon Yun, MD
Hiding In Plain Sight is a collection of essays that I have written on investing, healthcare, and life.
A Little Experiment
For the sake of experiment, read the next sentence once, while counting the number of “f”s that you see.
“Five-winged flies are the result of years of scientific study combined with the experience of many years.”
Most likely, you counted an “f” in each of the more vibrant words of the sentence: “five,” “flies” and “scientific.” Most people only see these three “f”s, when in fact there are six. The other “f”s are hidden in the unassuming preposition “of”. Your mind probably skipped over each “of” because it processed these words without absorbing the raw information of the letters that composed them.
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