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How modern medicine is harming us
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Mob medicine Conventional medicine may be losing track of individuals in the crowd, finds Linda Geddes 30 per cent of people and can even raise their risk of blood clots. It’s compelling stuff. Even if they don’t cause harm, drugs often don’t benefit most of the people who take them. Take Lipitor, a statin advertised as reducing the risk of heart attack by 36 per cent. Pfizer isn’t lying with this claim, but closer reading reveals 2 per cent of patients
BY THE end of this book, geneticist Eric Topol explains his intent has not been to provide a “techno-tour” of how the digital revolution will change healthcare. From the title, that’s what I had expected. Instead, I got an eye-opening account of why conventional medicine is doomed. According to Topol, modern medicine’s focus on the population rather than the individual may be damaging our health. He describes how mass screening for breast or prostate cancer often falsely identifies people who don’t have the disease, leading to unnecessary interventions and worry, and how Plavix, an anticoagulant that is the second-most prescribed drug in the world, is ineffective in
Happiness algorithm The Happiness of Pursuit: What neuroscience can teach us about the good life by Shimon Edelman, Basic Books, £17.99/$25.99 Reviewed by Liz Else
THIS may be a book’s best ever summary of itself: “when fishing for happiness, catch and release”. With a title that inverts one of the inalienable rights
The digital revolution could see healthcare tailored to the individual
Lydie LECARPENTIER/REA
The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the digital revolution will create better health care by Eric Topol, Basic Books, £15.99/$27.99
taking Lipitor had heart attacks, compared with 3 per cent taking a placebo – or just 1 in 100 people will avoid a heart attack by taking the drug. Topol slaps you in the face with facts like these and shouts: “wake-up!” The answer, he says, lies in technologies that tailor medicine to the individual – something that has long been talked about, but which is finally almost within reach. Almost, because although Topol tells some incredible tales of individuals with unexplained diseases having their genomes sequenced to find a cure,
established by the American a scientific, perhaps even Declaration of Independence, The algorithmic, explanation. Happiness of Pursuit is for fans of He begins this search with the enquiries into the nature of brain, observation that “the mind is mind – and happiness itself. inherently and essentially a When the author Shimon bundle of ongoing computations”. Edelman was 8, he came upon Over two millennia, he argues, Christopher Logue’s poem we have come to realise that our Epitaph, which asks: “What is the notion of self is partly a construct greatest happiness on earth?” The of those computations, and partly poem was embedded in a story a distributed entity that he which turned on the possibility of believes is “best thought of as a writing a happiness algorithm. “Edelman could not rest As a computer scientist and until he had made the case psychology professor, Edelman for happiness to be given could not rest until he had made the case for happiness to be given a scientific explanation”
they remain in a minority. Individualised medicine for the masses is still a long way off, and although Topol provides a seductive vision of the future, he is vague on just how we get there. That aside, the book provides an excellent summary of the current state of medical genetics and how fast it is progressing, with examples that may surprise even those working in medicine. As director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, California, Topol is clearly abreast of the very latest developments, and the book feels extremely current. The lay reader may struggle with some of the terminology in places, but if you can get through that, the book provides some practical tips on what to do if you or a loved one is diagnosed with a serious illness. I learned how to use Google Scholar to seek out expertise (type in the name of the condition to find the top-cited articles, then contact the senior author) and what tests I might demand if I was diagnosed with cancer (paired-exome or whole genome sequencing to better target therapies to the tumour). Whether I could afford such tests, or the health system would provide them, is another matter. But if enough people ask for them, just maybe the revolution Topol envisions will take hold. n
network of cause and effect that transcends the boundary between the individual and the environment, which includes society and the material world”. It’s comforting to think that our experiences can help us achieve the kind of gradual self-change that might promote happiness. In the end, Edelman does not deliver an algorithm for happiness, but offers a happy addition to the classic recipe of “self-knowledge, selfimprovement, and, eventually, selfless conduct” – a coherent notion of the self. n 4 February 2012 | NewScientist | 47
Mob medicine Conventional medicine may be losing track of individuals in the crowd, finds Linda Geddes 30 per cent of people and can even raise their risk of blood clots. It’s compelling stuff. Even if they don’t cause harm, drugs often don’t benefit most of the people who take them. Take Lipitor, a statin advertised as reducing the risk of heart attack by 36 per cent. Pfizer isn’t lying with this claim, but closer reading reveals 2 per cent of patients
BY THE end of this book, geneticist Eric Topol explains his intent has not been to provide a “techno-tour” of how the digital revolution will change healthcare. From the title, that’s what I had expected. Instead, I got an eye-opening account of why conventional medicine is doomed. According to Topol, modern medicine’s focus on the population rather than the individual may be damaging our health. He describes how mass screening for breast or prostate cancer often falsely identifies people who don’t have the disease, leading to unnecessary interventions and worry, and how Plavix, an anticoagulant that is the second-most prescribed drug in the world, is ineffective in
Happiness algorithm The Happiness of Pursuit: What neuroscience can teach us about the good life by Shimon Edelman, Basic Books, £17.99/$25.99 Reviewed by Liz Else
THIS may be a book’s best ever summary of itself: “when fishing for happiness, catch and release”. With a title that inverts one of the inalienable rights
The digital revolution could see healthcare tailored to the individual
Lydie LECARPENTIER/REA
The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the digital revolution will create better health care by Eric Topol, Basic Books, £15.99/$27.99
taking Lipitor had heart attacks, compared with 3 per cent taking a placebo – or just 1 in 100 people will avoid a heart attack by taking the drug. Topol slaps you in the face with facts like these and shouts: “wake-up!” The answer, he says, lies in technologies that tailor medicine to the individual – something that has long been talked about, but which is finally almost within reach. Almost, because although Topol tells some incredible tales of individuals with unexplained diseases having their genomes sequenced to find a cure,
established by the American a scientific, perhaps even Declaration of Independence, The algorithmic, explanation. Happiness of Pursuit is for fans of He begins this search with the enquiries into the nature of brain, observation that “the mind is mind – and happiness itself. inherently and essentially a When the author Shimon bundle of ongoing computations”. Edelman was 8, he came upon Over two millennia, he argues, Christopher Logue’s poem we have come to realise that our Epitaph, which asks: “What is the notion of self is partly a construct greatest happiness on earth?” The of those computations, and partly poem was embedded in a story a distributed entity that he which turned on the possibility of believes is “best thought of as a writing a happiness algorithm. “Edelman could not rest As a computer scientist and until he had made the case psychology professor, Edelman for happiness to be given could not rest until he had made the case for happiness to be given a scientific explanation”
they remain in a minority. Individualised medicine for the masses is still a long way off, and although Topol provides a seductive vision of the future, he is vague on just how we get there. That aside, the book provides an excellent summary of the current state of medical genetics and how fast it is progressing, with examples that may surprise even those working in medicine. As director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, California, Topol is clearly abreast of the very latest developments, and the book feels extremely current. The lay reader may struggle with some of the terminology in places, but if you can get through that, the book provides some practical tips on what to do if you or a loved one is diagnosed with a serious illness. I learned how to use Google Scholar to seek out expertise (type in the name of the condition to find the top-cited articles, then contact the senior author) and what tests I might demand if I was diagnosed with cancer (paired-exome or whole genome sequencing to better target therapies to the tumour). Whether I could afford such tests, or the health system would provide them, is another matter. But if enough people ask for them, just maybe the revolution Topol envisions will take hold. n
network of cause and effect that transcends the boundary between the individual and the environment, which includes society and the material world”. It’s comforting to think that our experiences can help us achieve the kind of gradual self-change that might promote happiness. In the end, Edelman does not deliver an algorithm for happiness, but offers a happy addition to the classic recipe of “self-knowledge, selfimprovement, and, eventually, selfless conduct” – a coherent notion of the self. n 4 February 2012 | NewScientist | 47