The Creative Destruction of Medicine, Eric Topol, MD
The Creative Destruction of Medicine, Eric Topol, MD
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The Creative Destruction of Medicine
How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care

Author: Eric Topol, MD

Narrator: Dick Hill

Unabridged: 12 hr 39 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/19/2012

Categories: Nonfiction, Medical

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

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 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 four hundred-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 twenty years in personal technology and medicine have been—remember phones the sizes of bricks that only made calls, or when the most advanced "genotyping" we could do involved discerning blood types and Rh-factors?—Topol makes it clear that we haven't seen a thing yet. With an optimism matched only by a realism gained through twenty-five years in a tough job, Topol proves the ideal guide to the medicine of the future—medicine he himself is deeply involved in creating.


About Eric Topol, MD

Eric Topol, MD, is a professor of innovative medicine, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, and founder of the world's first cardiovascular gene bank at the Cleveland Clinic. He lives with his family in La Jolla, California.


Reviews

Goodreads review by E-patient on May 11, 2012

I come from high tech, where there are zillions of innovations, few get any traction, and a small number change the world. This book is by far the best marriage I've seen of potent innovator thinking with medicine, social media, and information science. A lot of people are going to say this book is w......more

Goodreads review by loafingcactus on October 25, 2012

The book gives you all the pieces that will lead to a medical revolution. The revolution won't occur in hospitals or in legacy research tracks. You don't reposition yourself into a revolution. It also describes some aspects of how traditional medicine will be shifted in parallel with the revolution......more

Goodreads review by Ben on June 28, 2012

This book was though-provoking. The author believes that healthcare is reaching a critical convergence with technology that will revolutionize how patients are treated, how doctors provide care, how drugs are developed, and how people maintain their health. Low-cost genomics, hand-held medical imagi......more

Goodreads review by Karel on May 06, 2016

Outstanding objective book predicting key aspects of a medical revolution this decade -- individualized, proactive wellness, led by people and distributed sensors and data rather than professional medical organizations. Positive and practical, far reaching and meticulously researched. Topol deserves......more