The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B007M5V8HK | Format: EPUB
The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care Description
Until very recently, if you were to ask most doctors, they would tell you there were only two kinds of medicine: the quack kind, and the evidence-based kind. The former is baseless, and the latter based on the best information human effort could buy, with carefully controlled double-blind trials, hundreds of patients, and clear indicators of success. Well, Eric Topol isn't most doctors, and he suggests you entertain the notion of a third kind of medicine, one that will make the evidence-based state-of-the-art stuff look scarcely better than an alchemist trying to animate a homunculus in a jar.
It turns out that plenty of new medicines - although tested with what seem like large trials - actually end up revealing most of their problems only once they get out in the real world, with millions of people with all kinds of conditions mixing them with everything in the pharmacopeia. The unexpected interactions of drugs, patients, and diseases can be devastating. And the clear indicators of success often turn out to be minimal, often as small as one fewer person dying out of a hundred (or even a thousand), and often at exorbitant cost.
How can we avoid these dangerous interactions and side-effects? How can we predict which person out of a hundred will be helped by a new drug, and which fatally harmed? And how can we avoid having to need costly drugs in the first place? It sure isn't by doing another 400-person trial.
As Topol argues in The Creative Destruction of Medicine, it's by bringing the era of big data to the clinic, laboratory, and hospital, with wearable sensors, smartphone apps, and whole-genome scans providing the raw materials for a revolution. Combining all the data those tools can provide will give us a complete and continuously updated picture of every patient, changing everything from the treatment of disease, to the prolonging of health, to the development of new treatments. As revolutionary as the past 20 years in personal...
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 12 hours and 43 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Tantor Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: March 19, 2012
- Language: English
- ASIN: B007M5V8HK
For a book that has pages of endorsements from key authors and influential physicians, this book fails to meet the expectations - particularly in defining remarkably new disruptive ideas. Despite an excellent set-up and problem definition, this book ends up reading like a well-organized collection of articles from magazines such as Wired.
The premise of Topol is a compelling one - the developments and the relative maturity of mobile devices, PCs, Internet, genome sequencing and social media, provides a potential inflection point in the field of medicine. In the initial chapters that borrows heavily from themes established by Clay Shirky (for example, Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators, and those similar to ones defined in Hamlet's BlackBerry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age and The Third Screen: Marketing to Your Customers in a World Gone Mobile, Topol abstracts 4 key trends (4 C's) that are setting up the stage for the "Ds" - destructive trends. While the ideas themselves are not new, Topol condenses the ideas from various authors to clearly characterize the innovation potential in medicine. Topol also makes some astute observations on the use of guidelines and the limitations of population-based clinical trials. While this first part alone is worth the book, the rest of the book fails to live up to the excellent framing.
Dr. Eric Topol's book is an excellent review of what the promise of technology holds for the US Healthcare system. His background as a geneticist and a cardiologist as well as a highly regarded research scientist informs this book with the promise of the future, and it is the near future at that. Not something decades away. The advent of the empowered patient (by technology as close as their cell phone) extends the opportunity and methodology for significant reductions in the cost of health care for us all---without a reduction in quality. For instance, cell phones with a "lab on a chip" enabling individuals to substantially reduce the cost and compliance of monitoring one's blood work for glucose, cholesterol, etc. while empowering the patient to be more aware and in control.
His review of genetics was a little dense, but as readers we must all bear in mind how difficult it is to condense such a complex subject into a chapter of one book providing enough information for the lay person to become excited about the possibilities in front of us without speaking totally over our heads. The promise of pharmacogenomics is here today. Enabling an oncologist to test a cancer tumor for genetic markers that indicate which of several chemotherapy drugs would be most efficacious for a particular patient. The "wrinkle" in the system is that insurance company awareness and subsequent payments are running behind the speeding train of "Star Trek" medicine. I do believe we will as a society work this out.
As a health care professional, I highly recommend this book for nurses, physicians, administrators as well as interested lay people. There are so many cost pressures coming with health care reform, it is easy to get caught up in thinking that quality of care is doomed to decline.
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