The Downfall of Health and Wellness as a Challenge to Humanity: Using Science Fiction to Highlight a Real-Life Crisis

My academic career has largely focused on the importance of healthy lifestyle behaviors, in both primary and secondary prevention, to reduce the risk of poor health outcomes and improve quality of life. Despite the evidence and clear value of adopting healthy living medicine as a primary component of healthcare delivery, much of the world, particularly the United States, has remained mired in a secondary, reactive model, where unhealthy lifestyles and chronic disease are often allowed to run rampant before healthcare management is initiated. I was recently at a scientific meeting where a fellow attendee stated that our scientific writing would benefit from new perspectives and approaches, with a hope of resonating with audiences on a different level and hopefully facilitating meaningful change that has previously not been realized. This comment inspired me to consider science fiction as an approach to illustrate a real-life health crisis faced by humanity. There is an important non-fiction component to the science fiction story presented herein—unhealthy lifestyle behaviors have a substantial negative impact on human resiliency and, if drastic measures are not taken, these behaviors may in fact drive humanity to a tipping point from which we will not recover.