In many countries, and in the US in particular, healthcare seems to have become a battleground in which the various stakeholders fight for their slice of the healthcare dollar. Patients are angry, clinicians are constrained by contracts, healthcare businesses struggle to survive, and employer- and tax-funded insurance schemes are slowly being eroded. So what's the answer? Dr Glenna Crooks, president of Strategic Health Policy International Inc., Fort Washington, Philadelphia, US, believes that what is needed is a new paradigm to redefine the nature of healing itself. A paradigm in which patients and communities join healers in taking their share of the responsibility for healthcare.