The Creative Destruction of Medicine : How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care

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... How genomics, big data, and digital technology are revolutionizing every aspect of medicine, from physical exams to drug prescriptions to organ transplants Mobile technology has transformed our lives, and personal genomics is revolutionizing biology. But despite the availability of technologies that can provide wireless, personalized health care at lower cost, the medical community has resisted change. In The Creative Destruction of Medicine , Eric Topol-one of the nation's top physicians-calls for consumer activism to demand innovation and the democratization of medical care. The Creative Destruction of Medicine is the definitive account of the coming disruption of medicine, written by the field's leading voice. The digital landscape The orientation of medicine today To what extent are consumers empowered? Physiology : wireless sensors Biology : sequencing the genome Anatomy : from imaging to printing organs Electronic health records and health information systems The convergence of human data capture Doctors with plasticity? The rebooted life science industry The individual. How the advent of wireless internet, individual data, and personal genomics are revolutionizing medicine, from the laboratory to the clinic to the home