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Fighting To Keep Medicine Intuitive As Precision Medicine Takes Over

In The Innovator’s Prescription Clayton Christensen details how technology is disrupting health care.  He describes the provision of medical care as occurring on a spectrum ranging from intuitive medicine to precision medicine.  Intuitive medicine is care for conditions loosely diagnosed by symptoms and treated with therapies of unclear efficacy.  Precision medicine is the delivery of care for diseases that can be precisely diagnosed and with predictable, evidence-based treatments.  Intuitive medicine is almost entirely dependent upon clinical judgment.  Precision medicine not as much.  19th century medicine was intuitive; the 21st century will prove precise.

When we think about our role as doctors, we like to see ourselves as providers of intuitive medicine.  It’s how we were all trained – products of 20th century mentoring. And so we see of ourselves just as indispensable as we were 100 years ago.  But as medicine makes its march toward predictive care all of this will change.

There’s an endemic insecurity among the 21st century doctors: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at 33 Charts*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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