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

by Andy Kessler (Author)
Key Phrases: andy kessler, heart scan, calcium score, Silicon Valley, Don Listwin, Sam Gambhir (more...)

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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review
"Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure meets The New England Journal of Medicine." (BusinessWeek )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks (August 28, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061130311
• ISBN-13: 978-0061130311
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (61 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #393,250 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

65 of 81 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 (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.

54 of 68 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)

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.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining read on a hopefully just around the corner medical revolution, November 22, 2006

By	Hickboob (Seattle, USA) - See all my reviews

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

Former Wall Street tech investor and electrical engineer Kessler is trying to find the next big thing that Silicon Valley can bring its economies of scale to in the form of ever increasing processing power at ever lower cost. He believes that computing (hardware and software) can do for medicine what it has done for banking and retail - replace people with automation, save lots of money and improve results. As a technical, but not medical, person I find his vision of a medical revolution in the next decade or so is fairly compelling. The shift he envisages is from one from often futile, expensive and invasive treatment of advanced congestive heart disease, stroke and cancer to one of early detection leading to less invasive, less costly and more effective treatment. The exciting thing about his vision is that it seems to rely less on speculative technologies like nanobots and futuristic drugs, that may be viable in a couple of decades, and more on technologies that already exist and are in use but need to be improved upon to be more cost effective and more precise. Imaging and detection of specific protein markers for various cancers feature large in his vision.

The book is full of amusing anecdotes and characterizations and is a narrative reminiscent of Hiaasen's novels of his quest to try and understand how the technologies of Silicon Valley can be applied to medicine, a quest that covers trade shows, conversations with medical researchers, venture capitalists and so on. This book may not be for the prudish, politically correct or for those that just want the facts. Otherwise you'll find it a surprisingly entertaining read given the subject matter, the coverage of which did not disappoint either.