Eric Topol
Eric Topol
Eric J. Topolis an American cardiologist, geneticist, and digital medicine researcher. Before moving to Scripps in 2006, Topol served as chairman of cardiovascular medicine at Cleveland Clinicand founded the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine. Topol was one of the first researchers to question the cardiovascular safety of rofecoxib, culminating in the drug's ultimate withdrawal from the market. Topol's advocacy on the subject led to what the New York Times described as an "unusually public dispute" with the Cleveland Clinic's...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
CountryUnited States of America
My view is that we're not ready for that.
For diabetes in particular, we know there's a relationship between lack of glucose regulation and complications like blindness and kidney failure. So if you were diabetic and you knew that you could get your glucose in a tight, normal range just by adjusting your lifestyle, wouldn't that be great?
Where today people surf the web and check their e-mail on their cell phones, tomorrow they will be checking their vital signs.
The ability to diagnose an imminent heart attack has long been considered the holy grail of cardiovascular medicine.
Not only can consumers handle their personal genetic information, but they are getting genomically oriented and anchored about such data.
Of course, the medical profession doesn't like D.I.Y. anything.
Medicine is still all about treating populations, not people - one-size-fits all treatments and diagnoses.
About half of all people don't take medications like they're supposed to.
It's infrequent that people are rail thin yet have high blood pressure.
For some men, the inflammation of their arteries is a result of really low good cholesterol.
I have had my genome fully sequenced and have learned a great deal about which medications I would respond to and which might or would induce major side effects, along with knowing many medical conditions for which I'm particularly susceptible.
I use a portable pocket ultrasound device instead of a stethoscope to listen to the heart, and I share it with the patient in real time. 'Look at your valve, look at your heart-muscle strength.' So they're looking at it with me. Normally a patient is tested by an ultrasonographer who is not allowed to tell them anything.
The digital world has been in a separate orbit from our medical cocoon, and it's time the boundaries be taken down.
For people who have heart disease, statins are great. But if all you've had is high cholesterol, what you're doing is taking this 1/100 chance of getting a benefit and offsetting it with 1/200 chance of getting diabetes.