I have recently written several blogs about how our medical education system will be challenged to change the way doctors are educated and reimbursed in order to adequately care for pain patients in the U.S. I have also written about how supporters of personalized and precision medicine are asking serious questions about how a new generation of doctors will be trained to understand illness using new sets of molecular models. These models have been, thus far, the purview of research scientists and academics; not primary care physicians.
In Dr. Eric Topol’s book, entitled The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care, he explains how through the use of technology, we can begin capturing all the relevant data from each individual to enable precision therapy, prevent major side effects of medications, and ultimately to prevent many diseases from ever occurring. This is a book everyone interested in the future of healthcare should read.
Yet, I wonder out loud a few challenging thoughts:
With this massive upcoming wave of new digital data, even with the parallel development of massive computing power, how will clinicians handle patients differently? We will ultimately need a whole new pharmacopeia—virtually a whole new library of pharmaceuticals, which are as of yet non-existent—in order to deal more precisely with the new streams of individualized data. It will take several generations for this to come to fruition since we have a 12-15 year timeframe for development and testing of new pharma products. In the past 10 years, we have approved only 3-4 new drugs per year on average. If we increased efficiency by a factor of 5-10, reducing drug development to a very short turnaround time, it may still take 25-50 years to replace most of our drugs with personalized or precision medications.
In any case, doctors see patients everyday who need immediate answers to their difficult medical problems. These patients cannot take solace in the future reality where everyone gets a targeted medicine when they need it, at the right dose, and the right frequency, potentially leading to a cure. The question is, what best approach do we take with these patients now?
At Anatara, we use our convergence approach by integrating other proven modalities with the best medical approaches available today. Our strong early results warrant close attention since our current modern therapies for many diseases—autoimmune, cancer, heart failure, neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s, mental illness and depression, pain disorders, fatigue syndromes, and many others—fall short of being adequate.
Whole System Medicine is the future, not symptom-based medicine. Whether the future of medicine will be fully digitized or not remains to be seen, although I can say one thing. Anatara clinicians, each taking a patient’s pulse from different traditional medical approaches, can tell you more about the overall state of your health than any microchip available today; and I suspect that Convergence Medicine will still be the best approach for many years to come.