Archaic Medicine of 2013
“I’m pretty sure that to people 50 or 100 years in the future, it will seem barbaric that people in our era waited till they had symptoms to be diagnosed with conditions like heart disease and cancer.” – Paul Graham
It seems obvious that this is something we will have at some point in the future. It’s easy to speculate and think of wild ideas – but practical ones based on technology existing today? Not so easy.
What stood out the most to me from P.G.’s essay was the idea that we should think, ‘50 years from now, what behaviors do we have engrained as a society that will seem laughably archaic?’ I think medical diagnostics as it is today will be one of those things in 2063.
Thinking about continuous feedback medical devices means thinking about everything that is needed for such a device to operate. Obviously, the infrastructure and biomedical engineering required to make such devices will vary depending on the device’s function. Overall however, there are common elements:
- A supercomputer that can analyze complicated results and interpret them in layman terms
- Access to this supercomputer (current iteration of this: WiFi)
- A device with infinite battery life (short of that: at least a week)
- A place to view and analyze your own data privately and with those you select such as doctors (HIPAA will be a huge obstacle on the way to doing this successfully but the UI technology exists with data visualizations, etc)
- The bioengineering required to take analog data from cells and convert them into metrics easily sent in bits
The last one is the clear elephant in the way of things. Things like weight – perhaps you could rig a device in your shoes that measures it? Problem: weight does not require continuous monitoring.
Other things: blood pressure, heart rate, white blood cell count, red blood cell count, muscle growth factors, urea levels, hematotoxicity flags and a ton of other metrics I won’t be aware of until I see it in medical school.
All of the above are factors that typically come with numbers – we’re used to measuring them directly and getting metrics. What if we expand out of what we can numerically measure? What other things would you want to know about your health that we don’t measure with metrics now?
So much.
Cancer detection, flu virus warnings, abnormal cysts or growths (benign or invasive?), localized muscular or skeletal damage, average growth of muscle tone based on activity and duration, glucose levels in the brain, glucose utilization based on area of processing and so on.
Overcoming the technical challenges of detection, reporting and monitoring; patient education (read: everyone) of the output and widespread acceptance and adoption of such devices are all ridiculously complicated things both in terms of breadth and depth but we can agree it will happen someday. Question is, what’s the first step those of us interested in medicine and technology can take to make it a reality?