Medical field badly needs Disruption!
Health care has become a biggest challenge world over. The rapid growth of diagnostics, emphasis on ‘evidence based medicine’ and legal recourse by patients is putting the profession under greater stress. Adding to the woes are the regulatory systems and reducing funding by Govt. to individual healthcare. The medical profession is constantly under peer pressure, pharma industry and constant stress to maintain professional competence. The end result is rapid medication based on validated symptoms rather than substantiated data over a period.
You visit a doctor, spends few hours waiting for your turn and obviously your blood pressure shoots up. This happens to you on few occasions, you end up taking BP control tablets for life. How could few symptoms and reading of BP on few random occasions, result in life long medication.
Ideally, the symptomatic person should be hooked onto a wearable device, his BP variations observed over a period and then he should be put on medication. Also, there is need to differentiate the BP levels based on stress levels our body is accustomed to and can accommodate. The stress levels of a guy in rural areas will be far below the ones in the cities with constant tendency to stay stressed. Based on the individual life style, the body adaption would vary and should be addressed differently.
Similar is the story with blood sugar levels. An individual’s samples taken on few occasions and stays above the permitted levels, he is put on anti-diabetic drugs. How could one determine this based on few observations while ignoring the capability of body to self regulate and sustain. If the sugar levels can be monitored through a wearable to relate to periodicity, quantity and type of food intakes, it might emerge that these levels can be managed within limits by varying the quantity, gap between meals and type of foods.
Also, most of the diagnostics are based on blood drawn from veins, requiring a prescription and visit to labs. If these tests can be simplified and individuals can perform on their own at home, it should lead to substantial improvement in preventing disease.
Finally, mandating doctor prescription to buy medicines should be eased up. The logic that taking medicines at random will cause damage to individual health is a myth. Individuals tend to retain medicines from previous prescriptions, buy them from uncontrolled markets or take them from friends & family.
The OTC drugs list need to be quite longer than it is today and individuals should be able to buy common antibiotics and other common drugs to manage their health better. There are far more damaging stuff like liquor, cannabis and tobacco that is freely available on the streets that cause greater health damage than the restricted medicines.
Time to disrupt the medical field, with data driven approach!!
