Review by Booklist Review
Modern medicine needs a makeover. Topol, of the Scripps Research Institute, believes the process begins with embracing the digital world. His plan involves genomics, wireless biosensors, advanced imaging of the body, and highly developed health-information technology. Smart phones will tie these elements together to make health care individualized, efficient, and accessible. Topol foresees a future medical landscape characterized by virtual house calls, remote monitoring, and a lessened need for hospitals. Pharmacogenomics will pinpoint differences in the genetic profile of individuals that allows for development of drugs that maximize benefit without unanticipated side effects. Social networks will flex their muscles when it comes to medical news and breakthroughs in the life sciences. Digitizing health care could have a down-side, however: a digital dystopia characterized by depersonalization; an Internet crammed with medical data that might be accurate, misleading, or dangerous; the risk of privacy breaches; and the genesis of cyberchondriacs. Integrating sophis-ticated digital devices into the everyday practice of medicine is not the same as giving every doctor a rudimentary Star Trek medical tricorder. But it's close.--Miksanek, Tony Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Cardiologist Topol (director, Scripps Translational Science Inst.) surveys current and future prospects for advances in medical technologies and therapeutics. Current discussions about the cost of health care rarely include the large number of patients for whom "one size fits all" medications are ineffective (or toxic) or how personalized medicine (pharmacogenomics) has the potential to allow for faster, cheaper, more definitive clinical trials. Coupled with electronic medical records and health information technology, genetic sequencing could detect individual drug toxicities that only emerge after clinical trials, when made available to the general public. Imaging and wireless networking also offer new opportunities. While personal genomics is still nascent, and predicting just what technologies will be widely available when is problematic, Topol's take on information quality is sound. Challenges will remain-medical uncertainty, diseases for which there are few or no useful treatments, and managing expectations. Verdict Recommended for readers concerned with health care and health care financing and those who appreciated Clayton M Christensen's The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care, Siddhartha Mukherjee's Emperor of all Maladies, or books by Atul Gawande.-Mary Chitty, Cambridge Healthtech Lib., Needham, MA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
New England Journal of Medicine. As a result of his whistle-blowing, he was forced out of his position at the Clinic in 2004, when the two drugs were finally removed from the market. The author explains how "the large-scale randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial performed under the most rigorous conditions" will be superseded by individualized medicine. Sequencing the human genome opened up major new areas of preventative medicine; in the future these procedures will be able to identify medications that will benefit, or be injurious to, a small portion of the population who carry a specific genetic mutation, rather than the population at large. Topol weaves useful knowledge about how to evaluate the choices open to patients into this exciting account of the revolutionary changes we can expect.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
