Behind the insomnia of 300 million Chinese people, this big health segment is about to take off?

It is becoming increasingly difficult for contemporary people to get a good night's sleep.

According to the 2021 White Paper on Exercise and Sleep released by the China Sleep Research Association, almost 300 million people on the mainland do not sleep well. Among the insomniac people, the sleep problems of young people represented by the post-90s and post-00s are the most prominent. Globally, sleep disorders are also as high as 27% (Who's statistics). Behind these data are the tossing and turning and psychological suffering of each individual in the middle of the night.

Mainland residents' sleep Source: 2021 Exercise and Sleep White Paper

It should be known that long-term lack of sleep can cause or increase the risk of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, depression, diabetes and obesity, damaging cognition, memory, metabolism and immune system. Sleep disorders can not only cause and aggravate a variety of chronic diseases, but are themselves a chronic disease that deserves attention and is very damaging.

In order to improve their sleep, people began to spare no effort to find ways and means to help them improve their sleep, such as standardizing their work and rest, dietary regulation, exercise and fitness, relaxation and soothing, and trying to use various technological products to help and improve sleep, which created a huge market opportunity.

In the face of the common problems encountered by people all over the world, the "battle" of sleep disorders has undoubtedly begun.

Behind the 300 million people who did not sleep well,

A big health blue ocean market is emerging

300 million Chinese people do not sleep well, which is becoming an urgent problem to be solved in the medical and health industry.

According to the "Latest Survey Data on Global Sleep Status and Sleep Cognition and the Latest Achievements in Sleep Medicine" released by the Sleep Medicine Professional Committee of the Chinese Medical Doctor Association, 30.9% of people need more than 30 minutes to fall asleep, and 0.9% of people need drugs to help sleep to fall asleep, and sleep disorders plague a large number of people.

But sleep disorders are difficult to treat. The reason is that sleep disorders are the syndrome of many diseases, including depression, anxiety, phobia, schizophrenia, may be due to metabolic disorders and immune decline, as well as some physical diseases, and even including poor lifestyle, etc., the causes of these diseases involve different departments, classifications, and the professionalism of doctors is extremely high.

It is precisely for the above reasons that there are three major dilemmas in the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders.

● First, there are very few professional treatment clinics, and most of them are distributed in large cities, which is difficult to benefit more people.

● Second, sleep medicine professionals are scarce, and most of them are in the psychiatric departments of public hospitals, making it difficult and inefficient for patients to seek medical treatment.

● Third, most of the medical treatment process lacks data and an efficient one-stop sleep management platform, which makes the night data monitoring system missing, and the lack of remote closed-loop ecological management, and the treatment efficiency is relatively low.

How do I fix this? There are many attempts in the industry at present. Among them, the emerging lifestyle medicine is gradually beginning to be understood and recognized by more people.

Specifically, lifestyle medicine is an emerging model of medicine that treats and manages diseases by intervening in lifestyles, which refers to the control of diseases through diet, exercise, stress management, smoking cessation, and various other non-pharmacological treatments. These changes are not complicated, time-consuming, and expensive, and can be significantly improved through perennial measures such as improving exercise, minimizing sedentary time, eating a balanced and healthy diet, maintaining a healthy weight, not smoking, drinking in moderation, and maintaining social communication. This form of medical health, which has recently become popular around the world, is known as lifestyle medicine. Unlike traditional medicine, which centers on disease, lifestyle medicine centers on the way people live and the causes of disease.

It can be understood that in the past, patients with chronic diseases mainly controlled their diseases through drugs, while lifestyle medicine required people with chronic diseases to delay and control the continuous development of the disease by changing their lifestyles. In view of the causes of chronic diseases, lifestyle medicine advocates disease prevention, treatment and rehabilitation in a non-drug and non-surgical manner through the improvement of lifestyle evidence-based medicine.

As the World Health Organization points out, lifestyle accounts for 60% of the factors affecting human health. The current chronic diseases are mainly lifestyle diseases, as long as the lifestyle is improved, the probability of chronic diseases will be much smaller: clinical studies have shown that the overall efficiency of intensive lifestyle intervention treatment for cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases and metabolic diseases (prevention, reversal, rehabilitation) is more than 80%, and can change the expression level of more than 500 human genes, inhibit the expression of oncogenes, have a clear inhibitory and reversal effect on the occurrence and development of tumors, and effectively improve the 5-year survival rate of tumor patients. Sleep disorders are a syndrome of chronic diseases, and lifestyle improvements will help solve the problem.

"In the face of the chronic disease of sleep disorders, we found that it is difficult to achieve good efficacy only by relying on traditional drug therapy, and through psychology + physics + helping people scientifically formulate long-term effective lifestyle guidance and intervention, and then integrating artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, and Internet technology, it is possible to reverse and recover sleep disorders." Han Zhenya, founder of Sleep Technology, said that with the popularization of lifestyle medical concepts and technologies, it is foreseeable that the treatment and health management of chronic diseases will undergo tremendous changes.

It is worth mentioning that lifestyle medicine is more focused on the front end of disease prevention, which is consistent with the trend of national policy. In recent years, national policies have begun to move forward in the prevention and treatment of diseases, requiring a shift from treatment to prevention, and the same is true for chronic diseases. For example, the "Healthy China 2030 Planning Outline" clearly reduces the premature mortality rate of major chronic diseases as one of the important indicators, requiring the implementation of a comprehensive prevention and control strategy for chronic diseases, and achieving the health management of chronic diseases for the whole population and the whole life cycle by 2030.

Not only that, the mainland's health theory also coincides with the concept of lifestyle medicine. In ancient mainland China, Chinese medicine has put forward the theory of "treating diseases before they occur", which is intended to emphasize the importance of preventing problems before they occur to health, and the story of "Bian Que Sees Cai Huangong" is widely circulated.

In addition, the medical concepts of Europe and the United States also confirm the feasibility of lifestyle medicine. According to the latest research results released by the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the jogging-based exercise lifestyle has a good effect on preventing diseases. For example, jogging for 50 minutes a week can effectively reduce the risk of premature death by 27%. In addition to this, running is also closely related to a 30% lower risk of heart disease and a 23% risk of cancer.

It can be seen that with the blessing of policies and theories of traditional Chinese and Western medicine, the emerging track of lifestyle medicine is gradually emerging: it has brought new solutions to the market based on sleep disorder treatment or chronic disease management, and thus also has a huge commercial imagination space. According to Sullivan's industry report, the overall chronic disease management market size of 4.1 trillion yuan in 2020 is still growing, which gives the lifestyle medicine track good growth potential.

Following the big idea of lifestyle medicine, the entrants in the industry have begun to act.

Opportunities and challenges coexist,

How did the lifestyle medicine track break?

In the face of market space with great potential, many companies have entered the lifestyle medicine track.

However, it should be mentioned that although the market outlook looks good, lifestyle medicine still faces great challenges. You know, preventive health management has been mentioned for decades, but it has not become the mainstream of the market before. Behind this, in addition to the awareness of national health management to be improved, another difficulty is how to improve people's daily life, and the implementation of the program is very difficult. This has long been verified in the field of out-of-hospital management of chronic diseases.

So, under the huge challenge, how is the industry breaking the situation at present?

The practice of Internet manufacturers is to enter the field of preventive health management through their own "Internet genes". For example, Baidu Health has launched online consultation service platforms, diabetes centers, Baidu Health Medical Codex and other products to create an Internet medical ecology; Alibaba Health has continuously improved its pharmaceutical e-commerce model and launched its own business "Chronic Disease Welfare Plan"; Tencent has launched products such as sugar doctor intelligent blood glucose meter in the field of chronic disease management. At present, all major factories have achieved certain results.

In addition to internet medical intervention to preventive health management, many companies are also trying to go further, that is, to continue to penetrate into the medical end. For example, Manhe Beijing and Lingchuang Medical launched the Manhe Beijing Lingchuang Lifestyle Medical Center, positioned in high-end medical services; Life Theory provides users with lifestyle medical services through the E2B2C (Education-to-Business-to-Customer) model, and has now established 21 health management centers around the world...

For the first time, Speed Sleep Technology advocates solving sleep problems through lifestyle medicine, "The first step to solving sleep problems is to learn to sleep well first." Lifestyle is mainly divided into eating, moving, sleeping, through the improvement of these three steps can solve the problem of chronic diseases, that is, by intervening in the diet, exercise and sleep rhythm of chronic disease patients, scientific education and training for patients, so that patients know and believe and gradually master the skills and methods of healthy lifestyle, and find a healthy state. Han Zhenya, founder of Sleep Technology, said.

Taking the prevention and treatment of sleep disorders as an example, speed sleep has established the Jingdong Health and Sleep Center together with the China Sleep Research Association and Jingdong Health. The center delivers a healthy sleep lifestyle to the whole people and carries out Internet free clinic services, so that users can get sleep health solutions at home. In addition, relying on the online Jingdong Health Sleep Center, the sleep center of the offline top three hospitals and the sleep clinic network, Sleep has set up sleep medicine expert bases across the country to promote sleep graded diagnosis and treatment to alleviate the contradiction between supply and demand of doctors and patients with sleep diseases.

From the perspective of landing, through the integration of high-quality industry resources, Youmian has opened up patients, doctors, hospitals and data, implemented multidisciplinary diagnosis and treatment, and brought patients a better medical experience, which is mainly reflected in four levels.

● First, the hospital level: Youmian has established cooperative relations with peking university sixth hospital, west China hospital of Sichuan University, southern hospital of southern medical university, people's hospital of Guangdong Province, the third affiliated hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, and the first affiliated hospital of Jinan University for clinical diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders.

● The second is the doctor level: youmian outpatient center brings together hundreds of top experts at home and abroad, as well as thousands of outstanding medical experts across the country, through the development of interdisciplinary diagnosis and treatment mode, multidisciplinary joint diagnosis form, to provide patients with professional and accurate diagnosis and treatment programs, to meet the medical needs of patients.

● The third is the data level: Through cloud medical data + AI diagnosis and treatment + intelligent connection of all things, Youmian realizes the whole process management of the whole life cycle of the client, and the clinical treatment data is convenient, visible and shared, so as to realize the needs of the visitor's outpatient diagnosis and treatment + home treatment, and provide them with a clear treatment plan. At the same time, Youmian joined hands with Jingdong Health APP to create an Internet Sleep Medicine Center demonstration specialty "Youmian Center".

● The fourth is the patient level: Youmian not only complies with the brand concept of putting patients' needs first, but also has the advantage of establishing a one-stop medical comprehensive solution of in-hospital and outdoor, software and hardware, and is a rare research-based clinical set of psychiatry/internal medicine/traditional Chinese medicine sleep vertical general outpatient clinic in China.

However, as we all know, the patient's self-management awareness and ability in the prevention and treatment of chronic diseases are often important factors affecting the final effect, coupled with the fact that patients with chronic diseases need long-term and close monitoring and management, centralized hospitals are not suitable. These are the difficulties of chronic disease management.

The causes of sleep disorders are complex, sleep medicine covers as an emerging cross-cutting discipline, speed sleep to provide users with a one-stop comprehensive solution to help users really solve sleep problems, innovative combination of interdisciplinary diagnosis, as well as multidisciplinary joint diagnosis, the introduction of the world's many famous universities brain science research theoretical achievements, successfully developed the use of pulse magnetic targeting technology of sleep pulse magnetic therapy system, so as to solve the problem of insomnia disorders in patients with chronic insomnia.

It is reported that the rapid sleep pulse magnetic therapy system through 32 authoritative patent certification, is the industry's leading real-time monitoring and treatment integration and through the NMPA certification of sleep aid "black technology", non-drug safety and effective, to improve sleep quality, shorten the real effect of falling asleep time, created a new "data collection - dynamic analysis - intelligent intervention - doctor-patient interaction" whole process of healthy sleep management services closed loop, and the international leading CBTI treatment strategy cognitive behavioral therapy and sleep science, music therapy, mindfulness meditation, Relaxation training and other organic combination, the integration of Internet and sleep health industry resources, focusing on providing users with professional and accurate sleep services for sleep health, helping users to regain the lost healthy sleep lifestyle, and realizing healthy sleep at home.

Create active sleep management before diagnosis (wearable devices, sleep environment management), accurate diagnosis and intervention of insomnia in diagnosis (scale evaluation, medical monitoring), post-diagnosis sleep management and services (solutions, out-of-hospital health management), provide a whole-process healthy sleep management system for patients and hospitals, and further open up online and offline services, hospital and out-of-hospital management, which brings benefits from truly realizing medical multi-scenario integration, more accurate, more intimate and more convenient to solve the sleep disorder needs of tens of millions of users.

The data gives you a glimpse of the actual results. Since 2014, Quick Sleep has helped patients reduce the medication by 3 million capsules.

In summary, it can be seen that lifestyle medicine has obvious effects on sleep disorders, a chronic disease problem that plagues 300 million Chinese people. Starting from sleep disorders, lifestyle medicine will bring greater imagination space in the prevention and treatment of more chronic diseases.

Innovation and future of China's big health industry

Since the introduction of lifestyle medicine in the 1990s, it has gradually taken root in China and has a tendency to develop by leaps and bounds.

Judging from the current pattern of the domestic health industry, the entire market is still dominated by hospital medical services, but high-quality medical resources are always limited, and there are problems such as uneven distribution of resources due to different places and hospitals. As a result, existing medical conditions cannot effectively meet the diverse, individualized health needs of 1.4 billion citizens.

Not only that, preventive health management has been ignored by the market and the public for a long time in the past, but under public health events such as the new crown epidemic, people's understanding of health management has begun to improve, and the health consumption boom has begun to have the potential to blow up.

More importantly, with the advent of the mainland's aging society, the demand for chronic disease management will continue to increase. According to Qipu data, the population aged 60 and above on the mainland is 264 million, which has reached 18.70%. According to the "China Urban Population Health Report", by 2050, the population over the age of 60 in the mainland will exceed 30%, and the pressure on the prevention and control of chronic diseases will increase.

In response to this challenge, both the 13th Five-Year Plan Outline and the Healthy China 2030 Planning Outline put forward the "implementation of the comprehensive prevention and control strategy for chronic diseases" and the development goals of "reducing premature mortality from major chronic diseases". In addition, the launch of China's Medium- and Long-term Plan for the Prevention and Treatment of Chronic Diseases (2017-2025) and the 2020 Work Plan for Promoting the Implementation of Healthy China Action led by the National Health Commission have advocated "combining Chinese and Western medicine, encouraging traditional Chinese medicine, and finding ways to save people from non-drug therapies", all show that the prevention and control of chronic diseases has become a top priority in mainland public health.

In this process, the lifestyle medical concept with "non-drug" characteristics plays an increasingly important role in the prevention and control of chronic diseases, and has become an important practice of chronic disease management, and the industry has unlimited opportunities.

Of course, any industry needs to adhere to long-termism. As an emerging track, lifestyle medicine still faces many challenges, so it needs time to verify and precipitate.

In this process, industry entrants need to maintain their original intentions, continue to deepen and make breakthroughs, in order to reach a farther future.

*Cover image source: 123rf