Comedian-turned-armchair-expert, Dax Shepard, and his trusty-fact-checking-cohost, Monica Padman, talked all things health, tech and medicine with Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist, geneticist, digital medicine researcher and the director and founder of Scripps Research Institute.
The first 10 minutes give you a startling, whiplash-inducing look at how “shallow” US medicine really is. The good doctor starts by asserting that:
- As a nation, we need to “fess up about how bad things are” and acknowledge “the more than 12 million serious diagnostic errors made in a year in the US alone.”
- Doctors and patients have limited time together and if a diagnosis doesn’t come to the doctor’s mind within 5 minutes, it leads to a 70% error rate.
- Also, our “screening is so incredibly dumb.” For women, the “false positive rate for scans — whether mammographies or PSAs — exceeds 60%.” This leads to unnecessary biopsies, chemo, radiation, surgery and anxiety.
- Gents, you should be worried with the status quo too. Dr. Topol gets into problems about missing vital polyps around the 30 minute mark for you all.
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Once we get past the doom and gloom, the next hour and 40 minutes is dedicated to Dr. Topol discussing the benefits of applying artificial intelligence to our healthcare system, the concept of deep learning and relays the importance of human to human interaction in medicine. He also debunks the notion that AI will fully replace humans and why it can lead to efficiency that will restore the patient-doctor relationship.
You will also learn just what hypochondriacs Dax and Monica really are.
