Overview

The why

From a pragmatic perspective, Antecept is borne from the frustration of seeing countless patients in General Practice and the Emergency Department who have:

Advanced, devastating disease that could have been prevented.
Nonexistent health records.
Health inequality and geographic isolation from healthcare services.

Australians already enjoy the best quality of life in the world.

We want you to enjoy it for a long time, too.

Holidaymakers enjoying the pristine beach, with some shade shelters. Rottnest Island, Western Australia.

Philosophy

As children, we were often booked in to see the GP for a routine ‘check-up’, yet once we reach adulthood this preventative approach is cast aside.

Why is this the case?

Disease doesn’t magically disappear once people turn 18; in fact, it accumulates insidiously over time, then rears its ugly head when a situation worthy of clinical diagnosis is reached – like a heart attack, stroke, or ruptured aneurysm.

Why do we wait for our bodies to fail before we intervene?

Even our Toyotas receive better preventative care – regular oil changes, filters, tyre rotations – so why do we neglect ourselves until we blow a metaphorical head gasket?

Crocodiles are prehistoric masters of the ambush, yet far less prolific than atherosclerosis.
Cairns, Far North Queensland.

Our current approach to healthcare is lacking

Australia has an excellent reactive healthcare system – including things like aeromedical retrieval, ECMO, and robotic surgeries – such that if you fall sick we are very good at getting you back on your feet. We – alongside myriad private companies – spend hundreds of billions of dollars annually on this ‘safety net’ approach – if you fall down, we will pick you back up. Again, and again, and again.

A Beechcraft King Air ($16 million new), used for aeromedical retrieval and primary care clinics by the Royal Flying Doctor Service, at a remote town in Queensland.

Overall, the Australian healthcare system is engineered to react to illness, rather than prevent it.

Why is this a bad thing? It’s not – compared with many other countries, having this robust safety net for when the unthinkable occurs is an incredible privilege of living in Australia. But this approach falls short in a few areas:

Chronic diseases often run unchecked until a hospital admission is required – by this point, illness is advanced
Hospital admissions take an enormous toll on your health
Acute interventional care is risky and not cost-effective

A new type of medicine

A better approach is to prevent disease (and thereby hospital admissions) in the first place. This is preventative medicine.

As a field, preventative medicine has been around for some time, and currently it falls vaguely under the jurisdiction of General Practice. Internationally, physicians like Peter Attia, celebrities (e.g. Chris Hemsworth), and DIY figureheads (think Bryan Johnson) have brought preventative medicine into the limelight, albeit in an experimental fashion with high personal cost.

People staying active in the sunshine. Yallingup, Western Australia.

Locally, Australians are recognising the importance of preventative medicine, and are indeed taking basic steps to implement it, yet paradoxically it is increasingly difficult for us to seek primary care. Further, the collective volume of medical knowledge is expanding by the second, which makes it difficult for doctors, many of whom are stuck in a reactive model of healthcare, to stay up-to-date with what patients deserve.