Streaming now on Netflix.
ALS rarely begins the day someone receives the diagnosis.
It begins years earlier, while biology is quietly losing resilience.
Last week I watched Last Words of Eric Dane. ALS is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that gradually causes loss of muscle function.
Like many people, I found it heartbreaking. The time weakness appears in the body, we have already missed years of opportunities to detect that something wasn’t right.
Over the years I’ve worked with a small number of clients living with ALS.
It isn’t my specialty.
However, what struck me was that significant biological stress was often already present - environmental toxins, mitochondrial dysfunction, chronic inflammation, metabolic disruption and other measurable risk patterns. These will have been around often for a decade at least, detectable if anyone had bothered looking into them.
Granted - none of those findings prove causation. And ALS is extraordinarily complex.
But they do raise an important question: Why do we still wait until disease appears before we begin looking for biological dysfunction?
Genes matter yes, but genes exist within an environment that either activates or inactivates our genes.
The future of health care isn’t simply treating disease. It’s identifying biological vulnerability while resilience is still intact.
That shift - from diagnosing disease to detecting risk - is where I believe the greatest opportunity lies.
Because once neurological tissue is lost, our options become dramatically smaller. By then, we’re no longer preventing. We’re merely managing.
References:https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4334292/https://alsnewstoday.com/news/inflammation-explain-als-progression-faster/