Sunday, May 13, 2007

The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (and Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor

As we see our work here as part of huge integral world- medicine and technology, Imust tell you about this book:
The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (and Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor .By the writer Andy Kessler.
If you interesting about it, as far as i know, is reachable in amazon and probably in many other sites.
heres a book description from amazon:
"You get sick; you go to your doctor. Too bad. Because medicine isn't an industry, it's practically witchcraft. Despite the growth of big pharma, HMOs, and hospital chains, medicine remains the isolated work of individual doctors—and the system is going broke fast.
So why is Andy Kessler—the man who told you outrageous stories of Wall Street analysts gone bad in Wall Street Meat and tales from inside a hedge fund in Running Money—poking around medicine for the next big wave of technology?
It's because he smells change coming. Heart attacks, strokes, and cancer are a huge chunk of medical spending, yet there's surprisingly little effort to detect disease before it's life threatening. How lame is that—especially since the technology exists today to create computer-generated maps of your heart and colon?
Because it's too expensive—for now. But Silicon Valley has turned computing, telecom, finance, music, and media upside down by taking expensive new technologies and making them ridiculously cheap. So why not the $1.8 trillion health care business, where the easiest way to save money is to stop folks from getting sick in the first place?
Join Kessler's bizarre search for the next big breakthrough as he tries to keep from passing out while following cardiologists around, cracks jokes while reading mammograms, and watches twitching mice get injected with radioactive probes. Looking for a breakthrough, Kessler even selflessly pokes, scans, and prods himself.
CT scans of your heart will identify problems before you have a heart attack or stroke; a nanochip will search your blood for cancer cells--five years before they grow uncontrollably and kill you; and baby boomers can breathe a little easier because it's all starting to happen now.
Your doctor can't be certain what's going on inside your body, but technology will. Embedding the knowledge of doctors in silicon will bring a breakout technology to health care, and we will soon see an end of medicine as we know it".

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I actually don't agree with this. I'm a medical student currently doing research into using CT to detect cancer early. While I think these technologies hold a lot of promise, I've seen first hand how data can be wildly different just because of normal variation. Paradoxically, studies have also shown that early detection does not lead to better outcomes, either. So, while I think that technology will improve care, the doctor will, if anything, be more important in managing that care and interpreting an even more complex set of data.

Anonymous said...

Hi
Thanks for your comment.
I think you mentioned a valuable opinion.
Still, our way in the blog is to give you the power to be the judges. Sometimes we are just the bridge for an interesting tools, web applications and even books concerning the blog subjects.
The reason i mentioned this book is because i appreciate the editor and also i think it's an important subject to make brain storming about.