Dr. Greg Wells is a renowned scientist, professor, public speaker, and blogger who has dedicated his career to understanding human performance and health. He is also a three time bestselling author, including “The Ripple Effect”, a guide on how to optimize life by focusing on five key points: sleep, diet, movement, thinking, and performance. Centering around lessons learned in his book, he has given a Ted Talk at the University of Toronto entitled “Eat, Sleep, Move”. Moreover, with his PhD in Physiology, Dr. Wells has worked with numerous olympic athletes, helping them achieve their peak performance during the competition. He continues to research exercise medicine at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.
Currently, he is focused on being the CEO and founder of The Wells group, a global consulting firm committed to helping people in teams, schools, and businesses reach their full potential by prioritizing health.
“I love studying how the human body works. I like to explore the extreme experiences that humans have. For example we can study how people function in high performance sports and we can see how people do when they are faced with chronic illnesses. We can learn so much from both situations.
I had the chance to work with children after bone marrow transplants for leukaemia. While on that project I got to know the patients really well. Some did great and a few did not. Losing some patients that I was working with as a researcher was hard. I learned that I care deeply about people and the privilege of working with people who are fighting for their lives comes with an emotional toll. But I would not trade those opportunities to try to help in my small way for anything.
If I could implement one change in the Canadian health care system, it would be to pivot from treating disease to preventing disease. Currently we have a system that is designed to treat disease once we are already sick. This is important, we must have this support in our society, but it is tremendously inefficient and expensive. With our ageing population and the diseases associated with the obesity epidemic looming, we simply can’t afford the level of health care that we have currently. We therefore need to shift as quickly as possible to investing a greater percentage of our health care budget toward funding and supporting healthy lifestyles that prevent chronic illnesses in the first place. It's far more cost effective to prevent a disease rather than to treat it.
Right now there is tremendous stigma related to mental health challenges. We stigmatize people who struggle with mental health, we don’t understand mental illness very well and we certainly don’t have consistently effective treatments. We need to do better. This challenge can be overcome by us talking about mental health, doing research and practicing strategies to help people. We will figure it out just like we did with cancer in the 1950’s and AIDS in the 1980’s.
In my job, I love the people I get to work with. I’m surrounded by brilliance. I feel like I get to stand on the shoulders of giants.”
Comments