Predictive Health

It’s no stretch to claim that America is in the midst of a healthcare meltdown. Care is costly and unattainable for many, and often unsatisfactory even for those who can afford treatment. The medical system focuses on treating diseases and their symptoms, and spends so much effort—and money—in the last miserable month of patients’ lives that little is left to make sure that the preceding years are as healthful as possible.

In Predictive Health, distinguished doctors Kenneth Brigham and Michael M.E. Johns propose to radically change the current model by restructuring the way patients receive care. They introduce the concept of predictive health, which will turn the existing paradigm on its head—focusing on prediction instead of diagnosis, and health rather than disease. Rather than treating symptoms as they arise, doctors practicing predictive health would be involved in a patient’s life right from the start. A drop of blood from a tiny heel prick at birth would be run through nanolabs, the resulting information assembled into a picture of the newborn’s health. Any potential risk factors—risk for type II diabetes, genetic propensity for obesity—would be caught long before they became problematic, and strategies forged for treatment. In essence, health care professionals would become committed consultants, sticking with a patient for the entire course of their lives. The potential savings from this kind of partnership is staggering: the cost of lifelong health care would amount to less than the cost of a month-long stay in an early twenty-first century ICU.

Interweaving descriptions of phenomenal advances in science and technology with illustrative anecdotes and personal experiences of the authors’ combined century in academic medicine, Predictive Health translates the foundations of the new biomedicine into language accessible to a general audience—those who must understand the potential of the unprecedented opportunity confronting us if major change is to happen.

The product of a decade-long collaboration between two of the leading figures in predictive health, Predictive Health offers a deeply knowledgeable, deeply humane look at the state of medicine today, and the potential for medicine tomorrow.