It was dreamed of and financed by arguably the world's wealthiest woman—a Walmart heiress whose personal struggles with illness and the incentive-based system of American 'sick-care' kindled a desire for change, especially in her own rural community.

The Alice L. Walton School of Medicine received 2,000 applications from hopeful young future doctors around the country, accepting only 48 to come and study at the Bentonville campus.

Anyone who raises an eyebrow at alternative approaches to medicine can close the article now, because the curriculum includes art and cooking classes, gardening and horticulture—all tailored to engender a perspective of cultivating health, not managing sickness.

And that is the great challenge faced by the American medical system. It has improved the survival and care of life-threatening diseases and pioneered dozens of mind-boggling surgical procedures, yet the system can be given nothing greater than a failing grade for the state of general human health.

For a nation that styles itself as the greatest to ever exist, its citizens suffer from more non-communicable chronic diseases borne of poor diet and lifestyle choices than any other in the developed world, and nearly half of all American adults are obese.

Profiled in TIME Magazine, Alice Walton would like to see what the American health service sector would look like if doctors spent time focusing on preventing sickness from occurring rather than treating it once it arrives.

It's not a novel idea: the functional medicine movement is working on gestating a similar revolution among healthcare practitioners. It's so un-novel that it was expounded by none other than Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, who said so famously that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

To lead her school in embodying that message, Walton picked Dr. Sharmila Makhija, a gynecologic cancer surgeon from Alabama, who like Walton, has seen the dire shortcomings of rural health in her home state.

"The foundation [of the curriculum] is traditional medicine but enhanced with the humanities and the arts to improve the delivery of care—so we improve on how we [act] with patients and how we partner with patients," Dr. Makhija told TIME.