Eric Topol Quotes

#1. Medicine is still all about treating populations, not people - one-size-fits all treatments and diagnoses.

Eric Topol

#2. The U.S. government has been preoccupied with health care 'reform,' but this refers to improving access and insurance coverage and has little or nothing to do with innovation.

Eric Topol

#3. 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.

Eric Topol

#4. Where today people surf the Web and check their e-mail on their cell phones, tomorrow they will be checking their vital signs.

Eric Topol

#5. There are estimates that 2 to 3 percent of cancers in the U.S. each year are engendered by exposure to repetitive imaging.

Eric Topol

#6. Of course, the medical profession doesn't like D.I.Y. anything.

Eric Topol

#7. Nick Dawson, a leader of the Society of Participatory Medicine, uses Evernote as his electronic medical record, pulling in data from sensors and sharing with providers or family members.64

Eric Topol

#8. I love information. I can never get enough. I get bored easily.

Eric Topol

#9. About half of all people don't take medications like they're supposed to.

Eric Topol

#10. It's infrequent that people are rail thin yet have high blood pressure.

Eric Topol

#11. Seeing your glucose every minute on your phone, it really changes your lifestyle. You ask yourself, 'Do I really need that piece of cake? No, because I don't want to stress out my pancreas.'

Eric Topol

#12. For some men, the inflammation of their arteries is a result of really low good cholesterol.

Eric Topol

#13. A lot of the diagnosis and monitoring functions will be done through little devices- smartphones- by the patient with computer assistance. So it's a real big change in the model of how we render healthcare.

Eric Topol

#14. Our brain starts a long degenerative arc beginning around age 40.

Eric Topol

#15. The digitization of human beings will make a parody out of 'doctor knows best.'

Eric Topol

#16. The ability to diagnose an imminent heart attack has long been considered the holy grail of cardiovascular medicine.

Eric Topol

#17. 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?

Eric Topol

#18. There are certain mutations you can find across cancers in different organs.

Eric Topol

#19. I am prescribing a lot more apps than medications these days.

Eric Topol

#20. The digital world has been in a separate orbit from our medical cocoon, and it's time the boundaries be taken down.

Eric Topol

#21. Not only can consumers handle their personal genetic information, but they are getting genomically oriented and anchored about such data.

Eric Topol

#22. The stethoscope for listening to the heart is over. It's obsolete.

Eric Topol

#23. When I went to medical school, the term 'digital' applied only to rectal exams.

Eric Topol

#24. The problem is that it takes physicians so long to accept a radical change. And the lag is unacceptable.

Eric Topol

#25. Warfarin is the drug the medical community loves to hate.

Eric Topol

#26. 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.

Eric Topol

#27. When you're asked to have a CT scan or a nuclear scan, do you know how much radiation that involves? How many of those sorts of scans have you already had? Is it necessary? Is there an alternative? I don't think many people know about that.

Eric Topol

#28. Medicine is incredibly ritualistic.

Eric Topol

#29. We're all essentially surgically connected to our smartphones, and we're still in the early stages of realizing their medical potential. But they should be a real threat to the medical profession.

Eric Topol

#30. Chemotherapy is just medieval. It's such a blunt instrument. We're going to look back on it like we do the dark ages.

Eric Topol