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The entire book is The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care by Eric Topol.

Quote:

Beyond reading email and surfing the Web, we will soon be checking our vital signs on our phone. We can already continuously monitor our heart rhythm, blood glucose levels, and brain waves while we sleep. Miniature ultrasound imaging devices are replacing the icon of medicine—the stethoscope. DNA sequencing, Facebook, and the Watson supercomputer have already saved lives. For the first time we can capture all the relevant data from each individual to enable precision therapy, prevent major side effects of medications, and ultimately to prevent many diseases from ever occurring. And yet many of these digital medical innovations lie unused because of the medical community’s profound resistance to change.

I haven't read it yet, but it sounds intriguing and exactly what we have been discussing here, and seeing happen in our own lives. How many of us (raises hand) diagnosed and/or treated our own health issues after medical science failed us?

From reviews on Goodreads.com:

Quote:

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 wacky, because it hits the nail on the head in a way that busts the paradigm into pieces. And that's the point: "creative destruction" is a somewhat disturbing term - the point (IMO) isn't destruction per se, it's more what I call "dis-integration" ... the valuable parts of an industry coming apart at the seams, in a way that enables creating new solutions to people's needs.

...

As one example, the whole idea of a large-scale clinical trial is pretty much doomed, long-term, because as we continue to identify *specifically* what's wrong in an individual patient, it'll be harder and harder to find lots of exact match patients for a trial, and besides, a large-scale trial with 70% efficacy just shows that such trials are a shotgun approach: you select a bunch of patients without knowing which ones are really a good fit for your treatment. An educated guess. The smarter medicine gets, the less useful clinical trials will be.

It's part of a longer review where the person makes some excellent points. And so here we are: having reached the limitations of the "gold standard" of medical research.

Makes sense to me. Because finding out about this book led me to another interesting one:

Quote:

“No one should be screened for any disease, ever, unless the test is accurate, the result has meaningful predictive value, and there is something meaningful to be done if the test is positive.”
― Nortin M. Hadler, The Last Well Person: How to Stay Well Despite the Health-Care System