My new book The End of Medicine is out today

My new book, The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (and Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor is out today from HarperCollins. I hope you enjoy it.

Like Wall Street Meat and Running Money, it's basically a bunch of funny stories with the conclusion that cheap enough technology will enable early detection and a lot less folks will have a heart attack, stroke or cancer going forward.

I spent the last several years following doctors around, digging around research labs, going to imaging conferences and getting myself poked, prodded and scanned. And I hate the sight of blood, what was I thinking? In the end, it really comes down to finding silicon so  diagnostics can get cheap enough for insurance companies and Medicare to make  it mainstream. 

The press release is below, and over the next few weeks, I will put up a few excerpts.

For Immediate Release

Contact: Beth Mellow Publicity Manager Ph: 212.207.7727 [email protected]

 

Andy Kessler follows the money onto the frontiers of medicine and discovers that we may never have heart attacks and perhaps cancer again

THE END OF MEDICINE

 How Silicon Valley

(and Naked Mice)

Will Reboot Your Doctor

by Andy Kessler

 

Over a pitcher of beer, Andy Kessler's friend told him his amazing story of survival. He banged his head on a mogul and during a CT Scan for a possible broken neck, a tumor the size of a cocktail olive was visible. Had he not taken a tumble on the slopes that day, they would have never found the cancer in time to treat it. Early detection by accident – that’s the state of medicine?

Andy said, "I'm 47 and I got really scared. Surely there was some way to look inside me to see if I had some cancer or was going to have a heart attack any time soon."

And so in his new book, THE END OF MEDICINE, Andy sets out to discover the new medical technologies that will scale Silicon Valley style, and transform medicine from chronic care to early detection and cures. Andy says, "There are lots of interesting tools in medicine, but almost all of it is way too expensive. So, insurance companies and Medicare won't pay for it until you are actually sick." Gee, thanks for nothing.

In an attempt to take his health into his own hands, he makes an appointment for a physical, where his doctor hits him on the knee with a rubber hammer. He orders genetic tests over the internet, but then can't find a lab that will take his blood without doctor’s orders. He even has himself tested for Type I von Willebrands disease, an illness to which lots of dog breeds are predisposed. "What the heck?" Andy said.

But in a serious effort to discover what medical technologies are coming down the pipeline, he follows doctors and radiologists around, visits Stanford University’s research labs, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, and even Intel. He finds a company in San Mateo that writes 3D code to fly through virtual hearts, and researchers working on a silicon chip that would be able to detect cancer in our bodies. Silicon Valley is just what healthcare needs to get cheaper. Andy says, "It blew my mind, but then again, the thought of carrying around 4 gig memory devices or 20 gig hard drives and using them to listen to music was pretty whacky not long ago."

RUNNING MONEY followed Andy's adventure around the globe to discover new technologies that will scale, not only becoming cost-effective, but also profitable. In END OF MEDICINE, Andy tells more fun stories as he applies the same concept to the medical industry, not only finding investment opportunities, but also techniques and technology that will save lives, and do to doctors what ATMs did to tellers.

Andy says, "Maybe the early detection brakes aren't locking up on the active runway of runaway spending on chronic patients. It feels like it's not the end of the road in Portola Valley, at Stanford, at the Hutch, or for Scanning. Instead, it feels like the start of something big  probably just the end of medicine as we know it."

 

About the Author:

Andy Kessler is the author of Running Money, How We Got Here, and Wall Street Meat. He has written for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes and has appeared on CNBC, CNN, FOX, and Nightline. He lives in northern California with his wife and four sons.

 

About the book:

TITLE: THE END OF MEDICINE

SUBTITLE: How Silicon Valley(and Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor

AUTHOR: Andy Kessler

ISBN #: 006113029X

PRICE:  $24.95

PUBLICATION DATE: July 3, 2006

Comments

[David Ulevitch]

Andy,

Fantastic news. I've read your other books while flying the SFO NYC route and they've been some of the most enjoyable and interesting reads I've had in a while. Very Feynman-esque in writing style. Makes for a quick flight.

-david

[Matt Savarino]

Congrats & Happy 4th!

[Stanley Feld M.D.,FACP,MACE]

Andy
I do not think you will get rid of patients or physicians, because stuff happens. All the rest of the stakeholders will become minor.

Take a look at my blog (Repairing the Healthcare System). I think you will get some good ideas and figure out some technological application. I know you will be able to relate to the factors leading to the dysfunction of the system, if you hung out with physicians for any significant time.

Congratulations

Repairing the Healthcare System
www.stanleyfeldmdmace.typepad.com

[Henry Miller]

Dear Andy,

I really enjoyed your other books and will probably read this one too.

One thing I would like to say though, if you are worried about your health look no further than your supermarket for help. You've heard this a 1000 times before but it's absolutely true, you are what you eat... and drink! It's really just that simple.

Diet coke cannot replace the benefits of a tall glass of water. Neither can raw healthy foods be replaced with a cheeseburger with all the fillings or vitamins.

You want to save your health and your family's? Vote for politicians who will help make the FDA a non-governmental, non-profit organization. In addition, vote for people who will not be seduced by the lobbyists that work for Big Pharm and the Medical industry.

Staying healthy is really so simple if you use common sense.

Here is a good place to find some common sense about health: http://www.newstarget.com/

[Yamil Fourzali]

Andy Kessler

Dear Mr. Kessler, I am an IMG (International Medical Graduate) that is applying this year in the US for Radiology, with an interest in Nuclear Medicine. I just finished reading the end of medicine and I completely agree with you. In fact I talked about your book during my interviews, but many physicians looked at me skeptically when I tried to describe them your point of view (maybe I didn’t explained myself well). Many physicians here in the US, as in my home Country Colombia, don’t understand that markets are the ones that decide the prices for everything. Congratulations for doing a well analyzed description of the future in medicine even though you don’t have anything to do with it.

I would like to tell you 2 subjects you would probably be interested in.

1. The technological gap between 3rd world countries and the US has narrowed during the past years, and I don’t know if that is the reason that many people from the US travel abroad to do medical procedures that will cost them even 10 times less than in the US.

2. Maybe you would find interesting the amount of money an IMG spends getting certified and applying for a medical residency program here in the US. This, considering the amount of IMGs that try it.

Sincerely yours,

Yamil.

[Philip Snyder]

As a 4th year medical student and, formerly a lawyer, I am confident that Mr. Kessler is on a rabbit trail that will never pan out across the spectrum of diseases he suggests. His ideas sound wonderful, but he is missing a fundamental problem. Diagnostic tests inevitably incur false positives and false negatives, and to greatly simplify, as you improve on one, you amplify the other. So, for example, as whatever algorithm you want to concoct becomes better at predicting disease and reducing false negatives, the false positives will go up. People will be treated unnecessarily and that often is harmful. There's a word for that–iatrogenic. This is nothing new and well-known in medical research. Thus, silicon is hardly going to displace MDs. But, it may foster lots of unnecessary and iatrogenic care that will drive the cost of medicine far beyond where it already is today. In addition, it will provide new fodder for the med mal lawyers. Truly, medicine is an art and a science.

[Christofer]

Yea, I am also looking to purchase this online.
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[Nikita Khlestov]

could you upload this book somewhere for people from poor countries like me? pleeese!

[Jason]

Hmm..It's nice idea to upload this book online, might be on the any page of this blog and I am sure that It will bring more traffic to your blog. I think so.
http://www.intellidesign.info
http://www.nextpagerank.com

[Shaun]

Impressive work man. It really sounds good but would more effective so keep up the good work.
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