Clippings

Medicine in the Future

The Futurist issues this report on the future of medicine.

By 2030, adult visits to a doctor for an annual physical, blood cholesterol screening, exams for prostate or breast cancer, and many other important but nonemergency consultations will be a thing of the past.

The report also contains these findings:

2. Patients will, after initial privacy concerns abate, begin to understand that regular, consistent monitoring of many health indicators will act in their favor, preserving good health and indicating potential catastrophic conditions.

3. Insurers will price policies and make coverage conditional on the use of this system of monitoring and detection.

It all sounds pretty positive to me except a note that bots, basically, will scan daily results, send a text message to obtain more information if necessary, and schedule an examination for issues that warrant it. My mindset tells me that if I've been sailing along without a known problem and all of a sudden I get a text message about my blood pressure, I'll be pretty alarmed. Seems that some adjustment of expectations among both patients and doctors is in order.

Notetaking

Fast Company has a nice piece on the importance of taking notes.

As we've discussed before, your mind can only handle so great of a cognitive load--people can only hold so many items in their working memory before they start to fall out. Active listening--that is, attending to the speaker and jotting down the things that catch your attention--lets us invest our working memory in paying attention to the new thing the Facebook founder just said rather than trying to remember that joke he made five minutes ago...

I take lots of notes in paper mole skin notebooks; every week or so I go back with a different color pen and circle the key sentences; I then transfer these ideas to Evernote files on my computer; and finally, I blog/tweet/publish/email out the crispest, most important ideas or quotes.

That's a nice analog-to-digital workflow--one that can help us to attach our experiences to the mental latticework we call knowledge and thus recall info quickly. In this way, we can be productive for the long haul.

Perspective

A video and some tweets recall the remarkable accomplishments of Voyager. It's amazing that Voyager had the power to capture the imagination as it did, to accomplish so much with so little, and still remain invisible to most of us.