As federal regulators begin taking a closer look at the growing overlap between healthcare and consumer influence, one physician is bringing the issue into the national spotlight. Danielle Kelvas, MD has announced the upcoming release of This Is Your Brain on Marketing, a thoroughly researched and deeply personal work arguing that modern medical marketing has moved beyond persuasion and into the realm of biological influence.

Planned for release in late 2026, the book arrives at a pivotal moment, as the Federal Trade Commission and its newly established Healthcare Task Force begin addressing misleading and manipulative healthcare practices. According to Dr. Kelvas, this level of oversight has been needed for years.

“We’ve spent too long thinking of marketing as simple communication. In reality, it functions as behavioral neuroscience deployed on a massive scale,”said Danielle Kelvas, MD.

Rather than presenting a purely argumentative stance, This Is Your Brain on Marketing examines how healthcare marketing systems can shape biology, behavior, and identity. Drawing from neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and clinical experience, Dr. Kelvas explains how modern marketing strategies can influence dopamine systems, interfere with hormonal balance, and gradually alter how individuals perceive themselves and their lives.

The book follows a four-part structure — Becoming, Immersion, Rupture, and Reckoning — and applies these themes to major areas of health, including nutrition, sleep, weight management, mental wellness, and relationships. Throughout these discussions, Dr. Kelvas argues that many struggles people interpret as personal shortcomings are often biologically predictable responses to carefully engineered environments.

“What many people see as a lack of willpower is often a normal biological reaction to environments intentionally designed to shape behaviour,”said Danielle Kelvas, MD.

One especially controversial section explores how direct-to-consumer healthcare advertising has expanded the boundaries of diagnosis, turning ordinary emotional experiences into medicalized conditions while tying identity more closely to labels and treatments. Another chapter focuses on children, examining how marketing systems may affect developing brains, accelerate identity formation, and weaken long-term emotional resilience.

At its core, the book makes both a scientific and ethical case. Dr. Kelvas argues that any system capable of consistently influencing human biology and behavior should be subject to the same level of scrutiny and accountability expected of other major medical interventions.

“If a system can consistently shape biology and behavior, it deserves the same level of accountability as any other powerful medical intervention,”said Danielle Kelvas, MD.

Dr. Kelvas views the FTC Healthcare Task Force as an important institutional acknowledgment that the environments influencing patient behavior may themselves contribute to widespread health challenges — a recognition that strongly aligns with the book’s central message.

Ultimately, This Is Your Brain on Marketing is intended as a compassionate examination of modern healthcare systems and their impact on patients. After years in clinical practice watching individuals blame themselves for problems shaped by forces beyond their awareness, Dr. Kelvas hopes readers will better understand the systems influencing them — and stop seeing themselves as fundamentally flawed.

“This book helps explain why so many people feel damaged or inadequate — and why they aren’t. I’m exhausted by hearing patients dismissed as simply ‘noncompliant,’” said Danielle Kelvas, MD.

Across the globe, health systems are falling short. From Dhaka to Nairobi to Detroit, most were originally designed for acute care and structured to serve institutions—governments, hospitals, and insurers—rather than the people who rely on them. Attempts to digitize these systems consistently run into the same barrier: an outdated and unsustainable design. While these setups may work during emergencies, they fail when it comes to supporting long-term health needs.

Throwing more money or advanced tools, including AI, at the problem will not fix a flawed foundation. The real issue is not technology, but the underlying architecture.

Rewired healthcare focuses on building systems around people, not patching them for institutions. The future demands frameworks designed to deliver outcomes that matter—longer, healthier lives at lower costs—while using technology in a smarter, more integrated way.
 
Rashida’s Story
Take Rashida, a pregnant woman living in a village near Dhaka. She has diabetes and her husband is recovering from tuberculosis. Despite these risks, she has little knowledge of her health status or treatment options. Occasionally, a community health worker visits her, but her care is divided across three separate programs: maternal health, noncommunicable diseases, and TB.

Individually, these programs function. Together, they fail. Her diabetes medication isn’t reviewed for pregnancy safety, her antenatal record isn’t visible across systems, and her household TB risk is ignored. This results in incomplete, fragmented care. The health worker struggles to manage disconnected protocols, focusing more on reporting than outcomes. Rashida’s expenses mount, her records don’t follow her, and local administrators see only partial information, limiting their ability to allocate resources effectively.

This siloed approach—rigid, isolated, and resistant to adaptation—creates fragmentation. Simply digitizing existing processes or adding AI on top will only magnify the complexity. What’s required is an intentional redesign of health architecture, powered by technology.
 
From Fragmentation to Flow
Healthcare today is fractured into rigid blocks: vertical programs, disconnected community and facility services, hospitals segmented by departments, separate public-private systems, and insurers defining narrow coverage. Each block bundles services, protocols, and data into inflexible silos.

To create flow, these blocks must be broken down into functional components: discovery, navigation, diagnosis, planning, treatment, monitoring, and prevention. Each can operate as modular services delivered at the right time and place for patients. With technology, these modules can be recombined to maximize efficiency and outcomes.

For Rashida, this would mean:

Financing would shift to reward prevention and coordinated care instead of fragmented, crisis-driven interventions.

This is healthcare rewired: a single patient record, a unified care plan, and a financial system aligned with outcomes.
 
The Leapfrog Opportunity
Other industries have already undergone similar transformations. Banking once kept loans, savings, and payments separate, but now integrates them seamlessly around the customer. Telecoms did the same with voice, data, and messaging. Healthcare, however, has resisted change—caught between outdated monoliths and fragmented add-ons.

It’s often assumed that low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) cannot afford to rebuild systems. In fact, they may be better positioned to leapfrog because they are less entrenched in legacy infrastructure. With a clean slate, LMICs can design digital, patient-centric systems from the ground up.

So far, most efforts have produced patchy solutions: fragmented apps, partial registries, siloed dashboards, and scattered AI tools. The result is brittle—data doesn’t flow, workflows overlap, and guidance remains locked in manuals. Interoperability helps systems connect, but it alone cannot create a strong foundation.

True transformation requires a shared infrastructure layer. Beyond health IDs and registries, systems need core building blocks: patient profiles, workflow engines, knowledge libraries, payment rails, and app interfaces. Managed under open standards, these elements allow services to be modularized and then rebuilt around patient journeys.

Such systems are resilient, scalable, and future-ready. They make data central to care, streamline workflows, embed knowledge in every interaction, and tie payments to real outcomes.
 
Testing a Rewired Health System
How do we measure success? A rewired system should be judged on three simple criteria:

Currently, in most places, the answers to these questions are “no.” A rewired system would make each one a design principle.
 
The Bottom Line
Our current health systems are built on flawed architecture. To move forward, we must ask: “If we were designing healthcare today, for the people it is meant to serve, what would it look like?”

The answer isn’t layering more apps or AI on top of broken systems. It’s building a modular, patient-centered model that can learn, evolve, and deliver better outcomes.

It’s time to build that system. It’s time to rewire healthcare.