The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (and Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor

You get sick; you go to your doctor. Too bad. Because medicine isnt an industry, its practically witchcraft. Despite the growth of big pharma, HMOs, and hospital chains, medicine remains the isolated work of individual doctorsƒ??and the system is going broke fast.

So why is Andy Kesslerƒ??the man who told you outrageous stories of Wall Street analysts gone bad in Wall Street Meat and tales from inside a hedge fund in Running Moneyƒ??poking around medicine for the next big wave of technology?

Its because he smells change coming. Heart attacks, strokes, and cancer are a huge chunk of medical spending, yet theres surprisingly little effort to detect disease before its life threatening. How lame is thatƒ??especially since the technology exists today to create computer-generated maps of your heart and colon?

Because its too expensiveƒ??for now. But Silicon Valley has turned computing, telecom, finance, music, and media upside down by taking expensive new technologies and making them ridiculously cheap. So why not the $1.8 trillion health care business, where the easiest way to save money is to stop folks from getting sick in the first place?

Join Kesslers bizarre search for the next big breakthrough as he tries to keep from passing out while following cardiologists around, cracks jokes while reading mammograms, and watches twitching mice get injected with radioactive probes. Looking for a breakthrough, Kessler even selflessly pokes, scans, and prods himself.

CT scans of your heart will identify problems before you have a heart attack or stroke; a nanochip will search your blood for cancer cells–five years before they grow uncontrollably and kill you; and baby boomers can breathe a little easier because its all starting to happen now.

Your doctor cant be certain whats going on inside your body, but technology will. Embedding the knowledge of doctors in silicon will bring a breakout technology to health care, and we will soon see an end of medicine as we know it.