HOW THE GOOGLE PILL COULD USHER IN PROACTIVE HEALTHCARE
As we’ve been talking about on this blog for the last few years, health care is about to take a massive leap forward into its proactive future. Here is a great example.
Google recently announced they’re working on a game changing nano health pill. Its invisible nano particles will float around in your body, then detect and notify us of what’s going on – in real time.
This is of huge importance. It’s going to change the history of medicine forever because it will be the first time we’re going to know what’s going wrong, before it really does go wrong.
Think about being notified about an impending heart attack before it happens, or a warning about cancer while it is still treatable, years before it shows up as a late stage problem?
This announcement is so significant because it signifies main stream commitment by one of the world’s most advanced and profitable companies to a future of proactive, predictive medicine. The future of healthcare is on its way. Game on.
That future will be unevenly distributed, personally selected, but most of all it will be predictive rather than reactive. Why is this so important? Well, even your Grandmother knew that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
When you think about it, unlike most other things in our modern society, healthcare has historically always been a reactive practice. Got a pain in your chest? Give it a few hours (days/months) and if it’s still bothering you, get it checked out. In other words, we feel the pain or symptom and then we react.
Common sense tells us that this is not the most efficient way of dealing with things. Can you imagine waiting to change the oil in your car when the engine seizes? It makes no sense. The modern world has become modern because of efficiency of process. To a large part, that comes down to the pro activity of preventative maintenance.
We just have never applied it to health before, because other than taking good care of ourselves, we’ve never really known any way to actually do so. Even though it sort of scares us, we intuitively know that this is the right way to go.
This disruptive technology, along with the general move towards predictive health care, is part of what famed Venture Capitalist Vihnod Klosha calls the move from the Practice of Medicine to the Science of Medicine. This is incredibly threatening to the medical establishment.
By combining the anonymous data of millions, perhaps billions of users and data points over the next decade, science will start to determine the most likely health issue you have, the best prescription to take, then monitor your process along the way.
Strangely enough, hearing about this made me think of Keith. Keith Richards, famed guitar player for the Rolling Stones once famously said, “If I’d known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”
That quote sort of embodies one of the questions we’ll all have to start asking ourselves. Do we really want to know what’s going on inside?
Years ago, Keith likely didn’t want to know what was going on and the effects of the lifestyle. Of course, back then, the ability to scientifically know what was going on in your body was a pipe dream.
So start to think about it. When it arrives, (human trials expected within a couple of years) will you want to know?
