Predictive Health: How We Can Reinvent Medicine to Extend Our Best Years

In the new health care paradigm emerging in 21st-century America, “it is disease, not death, that will be the medical failure,” say Brigham and Johns, who pioneered the Emory Georgia Tech Predictive Health Institute to develop their concept of preserving patient health over a lifetime. Although most of their musings seem highly theoretical, some bordering on science fiction, the impetus they cite for urgently needed change—billions of health-care dollars spent to keep barely functioning patients alive—has caused a major breakdown of the system. From genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics to nanotechnology, bio banks, and cyberhealth, the authors cover many scientific and technologic advances that might lead to achieving their vision of mapping a baby’s future health through blood and genetic testing; following the child into adulthood to factor environment and lifestyle into the genetic mix; and creating treatment plans that prevent disease or minimize its impact on quality of life. The authors are literate and engaging, framing the biological drama as a grand opera and citing the likes of Epicurus, Sun Tzu, Albert Einstein, Marcel Proust, Bette Midler, and Dr. Seuss. Much of the book’s appeal will be to medical professionals, students, and scientifically minded general readers, but a final chapter brings the discourse down to earth with a moving expression of what it means to live and die well. (Oct.)