Eric Topol: We're still in the Stone Age of medicine

A new era of digital healthcare will make medicine more precise and participatory, but we certainly aren’t there yet, said prominent cardiologist Dr. Eric Topol.

Topol has been making the rounds recently, promoting his new book, The Creative Destruction of Medicine, and recently spoke with HealthLeaders Media about the book.

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“We are in a Stone Age of medicine still,” said Topol, chief academic officer with Scripps Translational Science Institute. “In the book, I paraphrase a quote from Voltaire that 250 years ago we did not know what we were doing in medicine, and 250 years later we have not made a lot of progress.”

Those comments echo Topol’s statements last week at the Digital Health Summit in Las Vegas, where he said that the doctor-knows-best attitude is outdated and expensive as new consumer tools bring floods of new information and data to patients’ fingertips.

Putting important health data in patients’ hands is one of the most important keys to bringing about the digital health “revolution” that Topol describes.

“There are more than 1 billion prediabetics on the planet, and we have warned them not to become diabetic,” he told HealthLeaders. “What if they could get their glucose every five minutes just for a week, and learn what are the foods and the lifestyle choices that are putting their pancreas into a high-gear mode we want to avoid? Wouldn’t that be a great education for that individual, because each one has his own environment, own nutrition?”