 I talk a lot about numbers and statistics, but as the Director of Yale's Prevention Research Center put it in a recent editorial, to reach doctors or fellow colleagues may we need to put a human face on it all. We have known for at least a decade that the leading causes of both premature death and persistent misery in our society are chronic diseases that are in turn attributable to the use of our feet, exercise, forks, diet, and fingers smoking. Feet, forks, and fingers are the master levels of medical destiny for not just thousands of people on a one occasion, like a tsunami or earthquake, but the medical destiny of millions upon millions year after year. We as doctors, a medical profession, have known. Ornish published 23 years ago, but we have not managed to care, at least not care deeply enough to turn what we know into what we routinely do. Were we to do so, we might be able to eliminate most heart disease, strokes, diabetes, and cancer. But saving millions of lives is just a number. He asked doctors to forget the bland statistics of public health and ask ourselves if we love someone who has suffered a heart attack, stroke, cancer, or diabetes. Now imagine their faces, whisper their names. Recall what it felt like to get the news. And while we're at it, we can imagine the faces of others, imagining beloved faces. Now imagine if 8 out of 10 of us wistfully reflecting on intimate love and loss, on personal anguish, never got that dreadful news, because it never happened. Mom did not get cancer, dad did not have a heart attack, grandpa didn't have a stroke, sister, brother, aunt, and uncle didn't lose a limb or kidney or eyes to diabetes. We are all intimately linked in a network of personal tragedy that need never have occurred, which leads to what he's asking doctors to do about it. Put a face on public health, every chance you get. We're talking about heart disease and its prevention of cancer, diabetes. Ask your audience to see in their mind's eye the face of a loved one affected by that condition. Then imagine that loved one among the 80% who need never have succumbed if what we knew as doctors were what we do. Invoke the mind's eye, he advises, and then bring a tear to it.