The Patient Will See You Now
Eric Topol, MD, is a world-renowned cardiologist, Scripps Research's Executive Vice President, the founder of a new medical school, and one of the top ten most cited medical researchers. He lives in La Jolla, California, and is the author of The Patient Will See You Now and The Creative Destruction of Medicine.
A trip to the doctor nearly always results in anguish. You'll make a reservation months in advance. You'll most likely wait several hours before hearing "the doctor will see you now"—but only for fifteen minutes! Then you'll have to wait even longer for lab findings, which you'll very certainly never see unless they indicate more (and more invasive) testing, the majority of which will almost certainly be unnecessary (much like physicals themselves). And your bill will be exorbitant.
Eric Topol, one of the country's best physicians, explains in The Patient Will See You Now why medicine does not have to be this way. Instead, you could use your smartphone to obtain rapid test results from a single drop of blood, monitor your vital signs throughout the day and night, and use an artificially intelligent algorithm to receive a diagnosis without having to see a doctor, all for a fraction of the cost imposed by our modern healthcare system.
The shift is being driven by what Topol refers to as medicine's "Gutenberg moment." The mobile internet is doing the same thing for medicine as the printing press did for learning, giving us unparalleled control over our healthcare. We are no longer reliant on an impersonal and paternalistic system in which "doctor knows best" because we have cellphones in our hands. Topol contends that medicine has been digitized and will now be democratized. Computers will replace physicians for many diagnostic jobs, citizen science will give rise to citizen medicine, and massive data sets will provide us with new ways to combat long-incurable diseases. Enormous, open, internet medicine, in which diagnostics are performed through Facebook-like comparisons of medical profiles, will allow for real-time, real-world study on massive populations. There is little doubt that the road ahead will be difficult: the medical establishment will fight these developments, and digitized medicine will certainly raise severe privacy concerns. Nonetheless, the end result-better, less expensive, and more human health care-will be worthwhile.
Among the best books on bioinformatics, The Patient Will See You Now is essential reading for anyone who believes they deserve better health care. It is provocative and engrossing. That applies to all of us.
Author: Eric Topol MD
Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Patient-Will-See-You-Now/dp/0465040020/
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