“[Topol is] one of medicine’s most ingenious thinkers about the digital future … [A] valuable contribution to a remarkable subject.”– New York Times Book Evaluation A trip to the medical professional is nearly a warranty of suffering. You’ll make an appointment months ahead of time. You’ll most likely await a number of hours up until you hear “the doctor will see you now”- however only for fifteen minutes! Then you’ll wait even longer for lab tests, the outcomes of which you’ll likely never ever see, unless they show further (and more invasive) tests, most of which will most likely prove unneeded (just like physicals themselves). And your bill will be huge. In The Patient Will See You Now, Eric Topol, one of the nation’s top doctors, programs why medicine does not have to be that way. Rather, you might utilize your smart device to get fast test results from one drop of blood, monitor your vital signs both day and night, and utilize a synthetically smart algorithm to get a diagnosis without needing to see a physician, all at a little fraction of the cost enforced by our contemporary healthcare system. The change is powered by what Topol calls medicine’s “Gutenberg minute.” Much as the printing press took discovering out of the hands of a priestly class, the mobile internet is doing the very same for medicine, offering us unmatched control over our health care. With smartphones in hand, we are no longer beholden to an impersonal and paternalistic system in which “doctor knows finest.” Medicine has been digitized, Topol argues; now it will be equalized. Computers will change physicians for lots of diagnostic tasks, resident science will generate resident medication, and enormous information sets will provide us brand-new ways to attack conditions that have long been incurable. Massive, open, online medication, where diagnostics are done by Facebook-like contrasts of medical profiles, will make it possible for real-time, real-world research on huge populations. There’s no doubt the path forward will be made complex: the medical establishment will resist these modifications, and digitized medicine inevitably raises severe concerns surrounding personal privacy. Nevertheless, the result-better, less expensive, and more human health care-will deserve it. Provocative and gripping, The Patient Will See You Now is important reading for anyone who thinks they are worthy of much better healthcare. That is, for everybody.
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