Human life expectancy, which remained stagnant at around 30-40 years for approximately 300,000 years, surged over the past two centuries. This rise was driven primarily by a rapid increase in energy use, particularly fossil fuels, which powered economic and scientific progress since the Industrial Revolution. However, endless economic expansion in a resource-limited world is unsustainable. The scarcity of easily accessible and affordable energy, combined with the mandatory energy transition to mitigate climate change, will have irreversible impacts on healthcare systems. Immense challenges threaten the delicate equilibrium of our healthcare systems, including natural disasters linked to climate change, restrictions on water and food supplies, pandemics, wars, and pollution. Health needs will become less predictable, necessitating significant adaptability from healthcare providers. Moving forward, the sustainability of our current level of healthcare is not guaranteed, even in high-income countries.
To prevent the complete collapse of healthcare systems, it is crucial to adopt a proactive, transversal approach, shifting away from the outdated paradigm of perpetual growth and the race toward endless high-tech hype. We propose developing low-tech medicine, a transdisciplinary method that merges medical and non-medical expertise, optimizing resources, reducing costs, minimizing environmental impact, and exposing the often-invisible health issues related to different sectors such as energy, education, water, sanitation, urban planning, agroindustry, and marketing, which have become increasingly detrimental to health. This approach could be developed in both high-income and low-income countries, through four main strategic axes: I) Redefining care; II) Reorganizing the healthcare ecosystem; III) Promoting low-tech academic and industrial research; IV) Implementing strategic foresight.