Category Archives: Health & Medicine

Scott Adams: Knowledge is Health

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Scott Adams tells us 50% of second opinions from doctors contradict first opinions? And that 80% of the findings in medical literature are wrong.

“A new company called Metamed offers to be your personal medical researcher. For a fee of $200 per researcher per hour, with a $5K minimum, you can make sure the full force of science is on your side. Metamed analyzes the medical literature and tells you which study results about your condition are reliable and which are not. They assess the value of various diagnostic tests, and create a map of all possible medical correlations. It’s the sort of thing your doctor would love to do for you if he had the resources.”

And those Google glasses everyone’s making fun of?

“I can also imagine a time in which Google Glasses will observe all of your food choices during the day and keep a running record of your nutrition. When you stray from a healthy diet, your glasses might start suggesting a salad. When you don’t exercise all day, the glasses might suggest using the stairs instead of the elevator. For all practical purposes, a human with Google Glasses and a smartphone is already a cyborg. And your future cyborg half will do a better job of keeping your organic parts functioning than you are doing on your own.”

UPDATE: Metamed went out of business in 2015

Medical scenarios for Google Glass

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  • An emergency responder arriving at a motor vehicle accident is able to live stream to the emergency department the status of the patients and the associated trauma suffered to a patient. The ER is then able to assemble and prepare for a patient’s emergency treatment.
  • A surgeon live streams to residents and students a live surgery–so that they can see what work goes into a medical procedure first hand.
  • A visiting nurse seeing a patient in their own home video records and captures images of the patient’s wound, for which they are caring for, and sends them back to the physician.
  • A resident’s physical exam of a patient is streamed back to an attending physician, who can critique their work and make recommendations on questions to ask in real time.  This could especially be useful when a resident consultant evaluates a patient while their attending is at home overnight.
  • A cardiologist in a cath lab overlays the fluoroscopy as they perform a femoral catheterization for a patient with a recent myocardial infarct.
  • A nurse scans the medication they are about to give the patient and confirms the correct drug and right patient by overlaying their patient profile with the person in front of them–possibly stopping a medical error.
  • A student brings up their notes and lab reports as they present their patient case to their attending, with data available in real time.
  • An oncologist can overlay the MRI scan over a patient, and show them and the family where the cancer exists.
  • The electronic health record at the hospital is available to caregivers, able to be updated on major changes in the patients they oversee. For instance, the recent cultures from a septic patients wound comes back positive for MRSA and the physician changes their broad spectrum antibiotics to appropriate therapy based upon sensitivities.
  • A pharmacist is able to scan medications and verify the proper drugs after comparing the drug with images available in the database, ensuring the right drug is dispensed.
  • A physical therapist can see past sessions with a patient from previous recordings, overlaying their current range of motion, identifying changes as well as progression.
  • Any healthcare professional could walk up to a patient’s bed and instantly see all their vitals such as pulse, BP, O2 Sats, etc.

An emotion-sensing smartphone app

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“An emotion-sensing smartphone app that automatically generates someone’s “mood diary” could give psychologists all the data they need. It’s the brainchild of Matt Dobson and Duncan Barclay, founders of speech recognition firm EI Technologies, based in Saffron Walden, UK. Instead of relying on people writing diaries, the app, called Xpression, listens for telltale changes in a person’s voice that indicate whether they are in one of five emotional states: calm, happy, sad, angry or anxious/frightened. It then lists a person’s moods against the times they change, and automatically emails the list to their psychologist at the end of the day.” (New Scientist)

Scott Adams: Our Robot Future

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“Some say robots will take 75% of all jobs. But that is only a problem if the average person who has a job is unable to purchase his own robot when the time comes and lease its services to a corporation, or put it to work directly. The robot will work around the clock and send its “paycheck” to your bank account. In effect, humans will become investors while robots become labor.”

“One can imagine that for every human taxpayer there might someday be fifty humans living off the government. […] In the future, people who have actual jobs might be a rarity. And one business-owner with a fleet of robots might earn so much money that supporting a million unemployed people doesn’t feel like a burden. I can imagine business taxes approaching 95% and no one complaining because the remaining 5% is more than Exxon’s total earnings today.”

“For example, when robots start doing all of the medical research, the speed of discoveries will increase a hundredfold. Robots will simply try every idea until someday there is a cheap pill that keeps your body young and healthy. The government will get out of the healthcare field when the cost of medical services becomes trivial, and I think robots will get us there.”

Scott Adams: Robots

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“I predict that someday robots will have superior rights to humans in specific areas of life because robots can be trusted (programmed) and humans cannot. … I will go so far as to predict that someday it will be illegal for a human to practice medicine because robots will be so much more reliable. In the long transition period, which has already started and will last another twenty years, humans will be in charge of what the technology does. Eventually those roles will reverse because technology will be so much more reliable than humans. Future generations will be appalled that humans were ever allowed to perform invasive surgery on other humans.”

“At some point the real cost of healthcare, energy, construction, transportation, farming, and just about every other basic expense will fall by 90% as robots get involved. It would be absurd to assume we know anything about the economy in thirty years. Nothing will look the same.”

Meditation strengthens the brain

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“New research from the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging suggests that people who meditate show more gray matter in certain regions of the brain, show stronger connections between brain regions and show less age-related brain atrophy. In other words, meditation might make your brain bigger, faster and “younger”. As lead researcher Eileen Luders explains, “it appears to be a powerful mental exercise with the potential to change the physical structure of the brain.”

Your Next Doctor Might Be Your Car

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“Since 2010, the USC School of Cinematic Arts and BMW have been working on Nigel, a Mini Cooper outfitted with 230 sensors that creates a log of everything that happens in the vehicle, letting users see it all via an iPhone and iPad app. Now USC’s Center for Body Computing is getting in on the Nigel project, looking at how the car could be used to monitor driver health as well as vehicle health.”

“One day, she imagines, a car’s pollution sensors, heart-rate sensors (maybe integrated into the steering wheel), GPS, and oxygen content sensors could all work together to tell drivers if, say, a certain polluted area of the highway affects their health–or if their heart rate goes up every time they arrive home or at the office.”

Physicians no longer control information

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“Physicians no longer control information. While the idea of a patient bringing new research to her doctor isn’t a new phenomenon, in the broader historical context it’s huge. For the better part of civilization our role as physician has centered around privileged access to information and knowledge. But the web has created a type of disintermediation. The face-to-face encounter with a physician is evolving as a more narrowly defined element in an individual’s quest to understand their condition and get better. Access to information is the bedrock of the health 2.0 movement.”

“There’s too much to know. There was once a time when physicians could get their hands around what they needed to know. You’d go to the mailbox and pick up that 200 page journal and you were all set.
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“Medical students continue to learn in a system that assumes we can teach a doctor what they need to know instead of empowering them to access what they need to know.”

Bryan Vartabedian is a a pediatric gastroenterologist at Texas Children’s Hospital/Baylor College of Medicine. He writes about the convergence of social media and medicine.

Testing a Drug That May Stop Alzheimer’s

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In a clinical trial that could lead to treatments that prevent Alzheimer’s disease, people who are genetically guaranteed to suffer from the disease years from now — but who do not yet have any symptoms — will for the first time be given a drug intended to stop them from developing it, federal officials announced Tuesday. NYT