Minimally Disruptive Medicine

One of the greatest health care challenges of the 21st Century is the rising prevalence of chronic illness and of multimorbidity, the presence of two or more chronic health conditions.1 Health care has responded with a rapid expansion of lifestyle and pharmacological recommendations, often formulated within single-disease guidelines and implemented across single-disease services. Patients and families are expected to navigate vast and complex care systems while integrating and enacting self-management regimens in daily life that health care delegates to them in part to accommodate the growing demands on resources posed by this tsunami of chronic illness.