Optimum Performance Living: Opportunities from fluidity, mobility, and sustainability

Optimum Performance Living (OPL) is what can happen when knowledge, finance, and good governance team up to provide the kind of health-related information guidance that is both credible and useful. The goals are to eliminate infectious and chronic diseases entirely. Mankind is best served to eradicate these entirely -- no shining disease centers on the hill to distract, drain, and debilitate the populace. We describe how this may be done -- both in terms of science and society. That is only the first step; armed with related information, the people can live out their lives better -- longer, with greater functionality, free from pain and distress associated with the diseases, and capable of achieving goals and having experiences that would not otherwise be possible. This is at the heart of the 2020 Vision of Global Health.

Knowledge. Ironically, its characteristics are not well-known. Important elements in the definition and use of knowledge have traditionally been lost with computerization. The 2020 Program and the validity of its associated systems is possible because of a novel way of organizing and using process-oriented knowledge, though it is based on the most ancient and fundamental definition of knowledge.

This is the underlying concept: Knowledge in its simplest and most powerful form is in the structure of a tree. One concept can be seen to branch to one or more additional branches, and on and on. In some cases, a subject needs to be considered in this manner several times over before it is fully understood. In other cases, similar, but substantially different sets of conditions need to be evaluated before a valid conclusion, a valid tree structure, can be reached. Typically, this process is carried out, not by subject matter experts, but by technologists, in the most complex and incomprehensible of ways. Computer programming tools bring huge design requirements for design that do not add value in and of themselves. In fact, they restrict otherwise knowledgeable people from participating in the knowledge design process. Strong cultural elements have thus come together to support a knowledge design process in which most experts cannot participate. It is little surprise that systems fall short of the mark when it comes to the complex, changing requirements brought on by nature, health, and medicine.

Fluidity is a means of using the tree model to empower experts themselves, with deep knowledge of a subject, to design and maintain integrated systems among themselves.