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

by Andy Kessler

You get sick; you go to your doctor. Too bad. Because medicine isn't an industry, it's practically witchcraft. Despite the growth of big pharma, HMOs, and hospital chains, medicine remains the isolated work of individual doctors—and the system is going broke fast. So why is Andy Kessler—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 Money —poking around medicine for the next big wave of technology? It's because he smells change coming. Heart attacks, strokes, and cancer are a huge chunk of medical spending, yet there's surprisingly little effort to detect disease before it's life threatening. How lame is that—especially since the technology exists today to create computer-generated maps of your heart and colon? Because it's too expensive—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 Kessler's 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 it's all starting to happen now. Your doctor can't be certain what's 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Business, Collections

368 pages, Hardcover

First published July 4, 2006

About the author

Andy Kessler is an investor, author and businessman.

Andy Kessler has worked for about 20 years as a research analyst, investment banker, venture capitalist, and hedge fund manager. He was also the Co-founder and President of Velocity Capital Management, an investment firm based in Palo Alto, California, United States.

He has written forThe Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Wired, Forbes, The Weekly Standard, the Los Angeles Times and The American Spectator.

Reviews

[Andrew]

Andy Kessler has a unique style, a style I personally enjoy, very matter of fact yet casual.
In this book, Andy Kessler investigates the health care industry.
Implementing his unique style, Kessler provides meaningful & thought provoking insight as to current state of health care & the reality of its future prospects.
I personally enjoyed this title, although heavily American based & influenced (for obvious reasons), I found it to be none the less insightful.
Given the health care industry has always presented itself as arguably the most important industry & now one of the largest (& growing) seemingly throughout the world - in particular the developing word - I recommend this book to any and all whom are seeking a matter of fact, hands-on analysis of it.

[Oliver Thylmann]

Amazing book. Doctors don't know their statistics. :)

[Thurston Hunger]

I'd wager the author is nowhere near as idiotic as his writing style. The book is an easy read, most of the factual information is loaded in attributed quotes to various folks, in an industry where I am far from being an expert, yet never far from being a customer. Kessler's wealth and/or sheer chutzpah get him access to a fair amount of interesting people and places.

I think you have to sort of shake off the style, and breezy delivery
(that does reduce some as the book goes on), and use this as a launching
pad for thought and/or web searching. Personally, I'm a big believer in
some form of "XOR" that can be run an a variety of images/readings of
your body from year to year. Certainly, folks who get their bloodwork
down on a semi-yearly basis, are already pretty adept at reading the
results. Hell they usually list guardbands so it is pretty easy to
tell where your hot spots are, and comparing them from year to year
for a trend is simple. Granted, maybe overly simple, but less daunting
maybe then going to a doctor for some.

Too bad, according to Kessler, you still basically need a doctor to
prescribe and receive the test results. Hmmmm, that could change one
hopes, and blood tests could become cheap enough for folks even without
med insurance to get theirs done every year or two?

On the "xor" tip...

I remember the slew of AmeriScan ads (AmeriScam) and I suspect it was not
just myself (and Kessler) who were excited about the possibilities of such
scans. And yet, suspicious. I like the idea of a worthwhile scan every two years and then compare for differences. One of Kessler's themes, aside from sheer greed to make a "killing" off health, is that there is a lock between Big Pharma and the FDA locking out more innovative, "early detection" solutions.

Kind of an "Electric Car" scenario, although he cites the FCC and regional
phone companies.

Hmmm, speaking of that discussion in the book, remember George Mills,
the FDA guy, who stealthily affirmed Kessler's suspicions in a sort
of clock and dagger episode late in the book?

Shortly after the publication of this book, Mills took a job at Parexel,
as VP of Medical Imaging. This book often reminds me of marketing types
networking...but again, I think there are enough details to keep one
engrossed. The R2 checks for mammograms, imaging races on workstations
at the tomography conference, self-referral issues with doctors and
imaging machines that they in part own; all of these were fascinating
to me. And it is nice that there is largely a local (Bay Area) angle
to this as well.

With all respects to Merck et al, I prefer imaging over drugs. But
I do still think a doctor, with a good "web-side" manner, will still
be hard to beat in many cases.

[Jonathan]

"...Kessler giggles his way through an intimidating diversity of subjects, including but not limited to a friend’s cancer, the US health care reimbursement system, heart disease, radiation therapy, in vitro diagnostics, LASIK eye surgery, nuclear medicine, computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, cancer screening, computer aided diagnosis, mapping the human genome, and molecular imaging research, all the while dropping names like highway litter. Moreover, rather than actually taking a moment to explain any one of these subjects, Kessler instead issues a steady stream of ad nauseam adolescent patter...."

-- from Metro Pulse [http://www.metropulse.com] December 21, 2006

[Soren]

The first two-thirds of this book are often laugh-out-loud funny as the author, a former techie/financial guy, searches out "the next big thing" in the astoundingly complex health care industry. Unfortunately, Kessler's initial analytical humor drifts into a dull diary of his quest to find a get-rich-quick investment, and his eventual prognostications struck me as haphazard and unfounded.

[Megha Guruprasad]

When it comes to non-fiction, I hate when the writer's personality overpowers the content..
Especially if the guy's desperately trying to be funny, using his 'wall-street' background as an excuse for his technical ignorance..
A waste of time

[David]

Glib, shallow, obnoxious, and peppered with inaccuracies. I'd rather not speculate on why rubbish like this gets published.

[Eve Harris]

Kessler writes like a wannabe Hunter S Thompson. I'm sticking with it for the subject matter, which -- even though it's six years old now -- is still teaching me a lot about medical technology.

[Bart Kramer]

Kessler is always a fun read. Perhaps the next big thing in technology?

[Keith]

- Conventional medical care is pricing itself out of the market
- Computerized diagnosis is a strong contender