Comments on: Health Care to the Year 2035

By: Richard Worzel

Richard Worzel — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:08:48 +0000

Effort by whom? Government efforts at health education tend to be pretty limp, for the most part. I think as new findings appear, media coverage will do most of the educating, much as with the value of anti-oxidants in tea has gone mainstream. Unfortunately, this tends to be very unsystematic, and often biased towards the sensational and the commercial, so much of the burden will remain with the good ol’ family doctor. Eventually, though, your computer companion / butler / avatar will assemble information relevant to you, and let you know which choices are better or worse. This will be a learning process for everyone – do we really want a computer-equivalent of our mothers nagging us all the time about what we eat and what we do? Probably, but in ways that have yet to evolve so as not to be too annoying.

Thanks,
Richard

By: Richard Worzel

Richard Worzel — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:02:53 +0000

Hi Ernie,

Indeed we do, and they’re going to get progressively more “interesting” as the population ages and health care eats the budgets of all government departments.

To your list of other therapies, I would add the attentiveness of nurses who are not overworked. I suspect that when we finally do scientifically rigorous studies, we will find that attentive nursing produces statistically significant improvements in outcomes. I also suspect we will find that there are a lot of other things that help or hurt as well, such as meditation or equivalent de-stressing (help) and engagement in violent vidoe games and videos/films (hurt). We are just starting a systemic approach to health, and our learnings have just begun.

Thanks for the thoughts.

Richard

By: Richard Worzel

Richard Worzel — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:58:59 +0000

Hi Donna,

Necessarily I’ve left a lot of things out, and glossed over others. I suspect that the development of this global health-bot network will be part private, part public. Private health care companies, including pharmaceutical firms and biotech companies, will find it so valuable to be able to access this network that they will pay to data-mine it. This will help to finance the continued development of such a network. However, the initial network will be created by governments, as is happening all over the developed world right now, with varying degrees of success.

As for the issue of rich country-poor country participation, I suspect that it will start with the rich countries, who will pay a high price to work the bugs out of such a system. Once there is a rich country network, and once the software and knowledge of usage is reasonably well-defined, then well-off countries will assist poor countries to participate, partly for their own good. After all, the poor countries typically have higher birth rates and poorer health care, with the result that diseases, like AIDS, are quite likely to arise there. Including poor countries, therefore, will help rich countries keep their health care costs down, and their populations healthy.

Beyond that, I’m not all that sanguine on global governance. While countries do cooperate when it’s to each of their benefits, very few have shown that they are willing to cooperate when it’s not immediately of benefit to them. I don’t see, for instance, the U.N. being a successful world government anytime this century.

Thanks for the comment,
Richard

By: Donna Brunskill

Donna Brunskill — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:41:23 +0000

So Richard, given this ‘conservative’ projection, do you believe this will occur within the context of a global governance structure? Will there be increasing world order that will enable a global caputuring of global citizen data? Will countries have to join a coalition? Will costs make it prohibitive for some countries to join? Or will it be ‘companies’ i.e., private sector, that will hold and capture global data??

By: Ernie B

Ernie B — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 03:27:50 +0000

There are other approaches to health that also have changed over the last fifty or sixty years besides the drug therapies. I would group massage/manipulation/acupuncture as one theme, naturopathy/nutritional supplements another and healing by foods/wholefoods, the burgeoning concept that seems to be based on ‘you are what you eat’.

Also more doctors seem to be trying (in spite of bureaucratic resistance) to treat people and not just their symptoms.

We live in interesting times.

By: Jennifer Lall

Jennifer Lall — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:09:56 +0000

This was fascinating.
Do you think that there will be greater effort made to educate the public on how environmental factors can cause disease?