The Patient Will See You Now: The Future Of Medicine Is In Your Hands

Description

A trip to the doctor is almost a guarantee of misery. You'll make an appointment months in advance. You'll probably wait for several hours until you hear "the doctor will see you now"--but only for fifteen minutes! Then you'll wait even longer for lab tests, the results of which you'll likely never see, unless they indicate further (and more invasive) tests, most of which will probably prove unnecessary (much like physicals themselves). And your bill will be astronomical. In The Patient Will See You Now, Eric Topol, one of the nation's top physicians, shows why medicine does not have to be that way. Instead, you could use your smartphone to get rapid test results from one drop of blood, monitor your vital signs both day and night, and use an artificially intelligent algorithm to receive a diagnosis without having to see a doctor, all at a small fraction of the cost imposed by our modern healthcare system. The change is powered by what Topol calls medicine's "Gutenberg moment." Much as the printing press took learning out of the hands of a priestly class, the mobile internet is doing the same for medicine, giving us unprecedented control over our healthcare. With smartphones in hand, we are no longer beholden to an impersonal and paternalistic system in which "doctor knows best." Medicine has been digitized, Topol argues; now it will be democratized. Computers will replace physicians for many diagnostic tasks, citizen science will give rise to citizen medicine, and enormous data sets will give us new means to attack conditions that have long been incurable. Massive, open, online medicine, where diagnostics are done by Facebook-like comparisons of medical profiles, will enable real-time, real-world research on massive populations. There's no doubt the path forward will be complicated: the medical establishment will resist these changes, and digitized medicine inevitably raises serious issues surrounding privacy. Nevertheless, the result--better, cheaper, and more human health care--will be worth it. Provocative and engrossing, The Patient Will See You Now is essential reading for anyone who thinks they deserve better health care. That is, for all of us.

Author description

Eric J. Topol, M.D., is professor of innovative medicine and the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, California. Trained at Johns Hopkins University, he conducted one of the first trials of a genetically engineered protein for treating heart attacks, was the founder of the world's first cardiovascular gene bank at the Cleveland Clinic, and was one of the first cardiologists to raise an alarm over the dangerous side-effects of Vioxx. The author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine, he is one of the ten most-cited working scientists, and was named Doctor of the Decade by the Institute for Scientific Information as well as a "rock star of science" by GQ.

Table of contents

Section 1: Readiness for a Revolution 1. Medicine Turned Upside Down 2. Eminence- Based Medicine 3. A Precedent for Momentous Change 4. Angelina Jolie: My Choice Section 2: The New Data and Information 5. My GIS 6. My Lab Tests and Scans 7. My Records and Meds 8. My Costs 9. My (Smartphone) Doctor Section 3: The Impact 10. The Edifice Complex 11. Open Sesame 12. Secure vs. Cure 13. Predicting and Preempting Disease 14. Flattening the Earth 15. The Emancipated Consumer