Hospitals

When Dr. Eric Topol’s name became a verb

Renowned cardiologist and digital health evangelist Dr. Eric Topol has been busy making the media […]

Renowned cardiologist and digital health evangelist Dr. Eric Topol has been busy making the media rounds pumping up his new book, which discusses how technologies like wireless sensors and genomics will transform the practice of medicine.

But a write-up of Topol’s interview with MobiHealthNews led to another kind of transformation: that of his last name into a verb — “Topol’d,” as in “How medicine will be Topol’d.”

The verb Topol’d is a play on another verbization (while we’re at it, I’ll make up my own words, too) of a name that Topol uses in his book: “Schumpetered.” With that term, Topol is referencing Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, who coined the term “creative destruction” in his 1942 book “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.”

Roughly speaking, creative destruction refers to when something new (and hopefully better) essentially replaces and kills something old, such as what tablet computers may do to laptops, for example.

The concept of creative destruction is so key to Topol’s thesis that he included it in the title of the book, “The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Healthcare.”

“There is a reset here,” Topol said. “This digitization of human beings will make a parody out of doctor knows best. We need partnerships. We need physicians working and guiding individuals. Each individual will have a much more precise view of himself or herself biologically, physiologically, anatomically, to work in partnership with physicians.”

Once that happens, MobiHealth says, medicine will have been Topol’d.

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