The End of Medicine, How Silicon Valley (and Naked Mice) will Reboot your Doctor [Hardcover]

Andy Kessler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 3, 2006

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.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kessler, bestselling author of Running Money, made his fortune speculating on Silicon Valley. Now he turns his nose for new technology to medicine. Will the same advances that revolutionized computers ripple through hospitals, changing how health care works? Kessler interviews doctors, technicians, radiologists and the businessmen behind technology in medicine. Advances in radiology—which encompasses all the ways we peek inside our bodies, from X-rays to MRIs—are beginning to make our hospitals look like Star Trek. New scanners can provide a high-resolution, three-dimensional image of the heart and allow doctors to spot blockages. Computer-aided diagnostic software is slowly replacing radiologists in looking for cancer in mammograms. But HMOs, lawsuits and patients' desire for personal care may prevent these new techniques from ever being used. As Kessler asks, "What if the future was here with no one to pay for it?" Kessler has a raconteur's ability to entertain, and his outsider's view of medicine is far from typical in a book on health care. However, his narrative is fractured by too many entertaining anecdotes, preventing his story from moving forward. The hors d'oeuvres are delicious, but in this meal, there's not enough room left over for the meat. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure meets The New England Journal of Medicine.” (BusinessWeek )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Harper Collins; 1 edition (July 3, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006113029X
• ISBN-13: 978-0061130298
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.8 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (61 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,083,512 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Andy Kessler is the author of Wall Street Meat, Running Money, How We Got Here and The End of Medicine. Andy worked on Wall Street for almost 20 years, as a research analyst, investment banker, venture capitalist and hedge fund manager. After starting a career designing chips at Bell Labs, Andy worked for PaineWebber and Morgan Stanley and was a partner at Velocity Capital. He has written op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Technology Review, The New York Times and elsewhere and has appeared on CNBC, CNN, Fox, NPR and Dateline NBC. He lives in Northern California with his wife and four sons.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

76 of 92 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Yeah we'll get there, July 10, 2006

By 

Scott Meredith "SeeOtter" - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The End of Medicine, How Silicon Valley (and Naked Mice) will Reboot your Doctor (Hardcover)

THESIS:
Direct visualization and personalized self-testing will replace current indirect poke-and-guess diagnostics. Docs will be thrown out of work. "Geeks are at the gates" of medicine.

METHOD:
Man-On-the-Street, Guy-Just-As-Intimidated-and-Ignorant-As-You-Are holds your hand for a walkthrough of medicine's thrilling futuristic Jetsonesque Road Ahead.

DISEASES:
Mainly heart attack, stroke, cancer. Snippets on obesity and others.

TECHNOLOGIES:
Various sorts of new digitally assisted internal 3D scanning and modeling methods, automated scan picture interpretation systems, computerized gene screening, etc. Basically it is CAM - Computer Assisted Medicine.

TONE:
Silicon Valley bravura.

HUMOR:
Labored.

KUDOS:
Covers (in passing) the ridiculous Lipitor scam (much better treated in Abramson's "Overdosed America : The Broken Promise of American Medicine").

QUOTE:
"Medicine is not vertically integrated or horizontally integrated - it's not integrated at all!"

VEHICLE:
Would've worked better as a medium-to-long magazine article in say Vanity Fair or Esquire or Men's Health. And some well-chosen pictures would've been worth 10,000 words.

WRAPUP:
Digital technology (along with money of course) is certainly the god of Kessler's idolatry, that comes through clear enough. This treatment of health care issues is about a quarter inch deep, but not a bad starting point for further amateur reading. Anyway most disease is probably psycho-spiritual - all this other stuff is just business.

66 of 80 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars This author failed the due diligence test., August 30, 2006

By 

Gary E. Cordingley (Athens, Ohio) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The End of Medicine, How Silicon Valley (and Naked Mice) will Reboot your Doctor (Hardcover)

As a neurologist well aware of medicine's many shortcomings, I was hoping to find that a smart outsider like Kessler would provide some fresh insights and solutions. Unfortunately, he didn't, and I was very disappointed.

First, the style was annoying. Name-dropping and pointless dialogues were apparently meant to pass for breezy, energetic journalism. But the biggest problem was that Kessler didn't do his homework. For example, he unaccountably decided that CT scans of hearts were superior in all ways to echocardiograms, which he regarded as second-rate rip-offs. He completely missed the point that echocardiograms show the heart's walls and valves in motion (the heart is a pump, it moves -- get it?), portraying its physiology and function in a way that no static anatomy test such as a CT could show.

The author failed Medical Reporting 101 -- evidently so confident in his own wisdom that he didn't have to get his facts straight. I imagine he's a better investor than medical reporter, but, due to his lack of due diligence in getting his medical facts straight, this reader won't bother to investigate his other books.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a must read for anyone interested in healthcare, July 8, 2006

By 

John Haughom "jhaughom" (Eugene, OR) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The End of Medicine, How Silicon Valley (and Naked Mice) will Reboot your Doctor (Hardcover)

I just finished reading Andy Kessler's book and found it fascinating. As a physician, the medical technologies reviewed in the book were not new to me, but the concept of how digital technology could scale and disrupt was very thought provoking. I believe the premise of Mr. Kessler's book is right on the mark, and I have recommended it to dozens of friends across the country who endeavor to lead meaningful change in an industry that is long overdue for some. By the way, the author's characterization of the industry and profession, while not flattering, was also largely very accurate. This is a must read for anyone interested in healthcare.