TEDxSalford

Diagnosing Medicine’s Future

An endlessly evolving area of scientific advancement, the field of medicine is one of the deepest, most complex topics we could hope to dive into. It’s one of the primary themes of TED talkers across the globe, and produces some of the most exciting breakthroughs in research today. I’d like to cover a few of the things that have piqued my interest recently in the field of health and medicine. 

As you might remember from my post on the recent self-tracking movement known as the Quantified Self, I’m fascinated by the way technology can be used to help us diagnose, improve, and keep track of our health and fitness – in particular, affordable consumer technology, like mobile apps and gadgets. This area was explored, amongst many others, in a TED talk by Walter de Brouwer at the TEDxAcademy summit in Athens last year entitled  ”Futurist, semiotician and internet entrepreneur” de Brouwer is a man of many talents, being the former CEO of the ‘One Laptop Per Child’ project, and one of the founding members of TEDGlobal.

We’ve come a long way in the last few years, he says, and we’re on the edge of making some incredible changes in the way people’s health is managed. There will be a huge decentralization in the way medicine is administered, as people’s health records are moved out of the doctor’s surgery and into the cloud. Instead of wasting time travelling to surgeries and waiting for attention, we’ll be able to monitor our own blood pressure, glucose levels, heart rate, and much more on our own smartphones, and get a diagnosis from a doctor (or computer) thousands of miles away. Then, if there’s reason for concern, a visit to the doctor would be recommended.

It’s not a failsafe method, but the massive increases in efficiency for all parties involved will surely be an advantage. Doctors would see their workloads become clearer, meaning they give more attention to the priority cases that really demand their expertise, and patients would spend less time worrying and more time living. Not only that, but decentralized medicine is available 24 hours a day – which your local doctor is not.

“This is the future – the doctor’s office is going to be a call centre” – Walter de Brouwer

Given the exponential growth in computer processing power year-by-year, and the recent innovations in semantic understanding that computers are now capable of, it’s inevitable that the idea of totally replacing doctors will be explored. de Brouwer mentions the idea of supercomputers like IBM’s Watson being tasked in a medical context. I can see this happening in the next 50 years, although like many technological advances, it’s hard to imagine the current generation handing over control of such an intimate role to a machine. I recently saw a dear friend of mine graduate from medical school – and having seen the herculean effort that was put into her achievement, I’m sure she would feel the same way.

So what could go wrong? Well, at least with consumer medicine apps, there’s always the risk of mistaken diagnosis. The plight of the cyberchodriac is a truly modern one, and as someone who’s first thought when something’s bleeding is to rush to Google and ask for help, I can’t say I don’t identify with them. Frantically searching for the meaning of every symptom that ails them, the cyberchondriac sees a search engine’s ruthless algorithms dictate their worst fears, and assume the worst. As this technology develops, we should hopefully see dramatic improvements in accuracy, and better warning systems for anxious patients who are a little eager to diagnose themselves with the plague.

As well as this, the idea of decentralizing medicine means that there will be various power shifts between those that oversee medicine’s future. Consumers will be empowered by the devices in their pockets and homes, but treatment will still often be in the hands of their doctors, and the pharmaceutical conglomerates that bankroll them. So too will the power of the telecoms giant increase – we’ve already seen what happens when their systems fail, disrupting the daily activities of millions of people, letting criminals run loose – what happens if, for example, the link between our 3G-enabled blood-pressure monitor and our doctor’s emergency warning system fails?

Doctor and journalist Atul Gawande is an expert in medical efficiency and safety, having written an oddly gripping book called The Checklist Manifesto. In this, he espouses the need to trust the fact that humans are fallible while performing important tasks such as surgery or flying an aeroplane, and to hand over part of their work to a simple checklist. I’m not quite sure what made me read this book – in summary, it sounds like one of the dullest books ever written – but it gave me some great insights into how people perform incredibly complex tasks under pressure. He gave a talk at the TED conference in California this year – ‘How Do We Heal Medicine?‘ – expanding on this idea. Although his idea can theoretically be practised with a pen and paper, computers are more reliable and flexible in keeping track of the information from a checklist, and Gawande is enthusiastic about technology’s role in this.

There’s a vast, growing library of TED talks regarding the future of medicine that you can spend days exploring. Try searching TED.com for “medicine” or “health,” or have a look at the talks below:

• Eric Topol on the Wireless Future of Medicine
• Anne Wojcicki on Consumer Genomic Testing
• Lucien Engelen on Crowdsourcing Your Health

We even have a conference dedicated entirely to health and medicine, called TEDMED – you can see the huge range of videos online here. And for some further reading – Big Think has a short but bounteous article on the future of medicine apps that you might also enjoy, and The Economist has an inspiring article on how ‘bluetooth shoes’ can bring vision to the blind. Feel free to share any more resources on this amazing new trend in medicine.