Predictive Health: How We Can Reinvent Medicine to Extend Our Best Years

by Kenneth L. Brigham, Michael M.E. Johns

Our health care system is crippled by desperate efforts to prevent the inevitable. A third of the national Medicare budget -- nearly 175 billion -- is spent on the final year of life, and a third of that amount on the final month, often on expensive (and futile) treatments. Such efforts betray a fundamental flaw in how we think about we squander resources on hopeless situations, instead of using them to actually improve health.

In Predictive Health , distinguished doctors Kenneth Brigham and Michael M.E. Johns propose a invest earlier -- and use science and technology to make healthcare more available and affordable. Every child would begin life with a post-natal genetic screen, when potential risk -- say for type II diabetes or heart disease -- would be found. More data on biology, behavior, and environment would be captured throughout her life. Using this information, health-care workers and the people they care for could forge personal strategies for healthier living long before a small glitch blows up into major disease. This real health care wouldn't just replace much of modern disease care -- it would make it obsolete. The result, according to Brigham and Johns, will be a life defined by a long stay at top physical and mental form, rather than an early peak and long decline. Accomplishing this goal will require new tools, new clinics, fewer doctors and more mentors, smarter companies, and engaged patients. In short, it will require a revolution. Thanks to a decade-long collaboration between Brigham, Johns and others, it is already underway.

An optimistic plan for reducing or eliminating many chronic diseases as well as reforming our faltering medical system, Predictive Health is a deeply knowledgeable, deeply humane proposal for how we can reallocate expenses and resources to prolong the best years of life, rather than extending the worst.

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Predictive Health makes the case for anticipatory health and wellness as the basis for a new healthcare system to replace the inherently reactive, disease-oriented focus of healthcare today. Their argument is that our understanding of human health is becoming more holistic in parallel with rapidly improving diagnostics and big data predictive power and that these advances enable a completely new and better approach to keeping people healthy. I agree with the vision but differ on the near term practicality of the authors' specific proposals, which seemed more fanciful than constructive given the current state of healthcare in the US.

[Elisabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book discussing possible future developments in medicine and health care, nutrigenomics etc. I would have given 2* but the tale of a couple being seen by a doctor with the woman clearly pregnant and showing symptoms of kidney infection asks when she's due, they don't understand and he says they've been so careful to take the pill. Doctor asks if any day was missed by accident at all and the man responds he had been careful to take them every day as he always thought birth control should be the man's duty. That story alone made the book for me.

[Ariadna73 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is my summary of this very interesting book:

Notes on Brigham (2012); Predictive Health

[Christina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was very well written, and written accessibly as well. As someone who works in healthcare (experience in NZ & Canada) and is often frustrated by the current medical model of disease treatment rather than promoting health, I enjoyed this book. I hope many of the suggestions put forth and being trialed by the authors at Emory are taken up more broadly (potentially can be initiated by some of the public systems? I think there would be appetite in NZ for this). I'd been keen to one day be a "health partner", empowering individuals to understand and make educated choices about their health, resulting in longer quality of life and improved end of life care.

[Mrspam4ever · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was an interesting read! Always looking for ways to improve my health and prolong my life on this earth. We need to help ourselves for our families, as well as ourselves in any way we can! I donated it to the library because now is the time of year people really think about health and such.