State of our medicine and how to improve it

Fujitsu data analytics for cows using Azure

Fujitsu developed deceptively simple technology to detect estrus (fertility period)  in cows as shown in the article. The first question comes to mind is what does this have to do with state of medicine for humans, but answer is easy, technology!

The concept Fujitsu engineers used was based on attaching WiFi pedometers to one of the cows legs and collecting stepping data of large group of cows (few thousands) over period of time. The data was fed to Microsofts Machine learning cloud application Azure for pattern recognition. Ingeniously simple idea powered by exceptional technology (Azure) to provide impressive results.

Azure not only detected estrus by cows stepping pattern but did it with such precision that farmers could control offspring gender. In addition or as a bonus Azure detected eight stepping patterns /activities that positively identified eight despises in cows. Isn't this wonderful? Give large chunk of data to a machine (Azure) and the results are surprisingly good.

Lets examine what happen because this is a monumental achievement with lasting effects or as we call it quiet revolution of type 3 civilization.

The main reason for breakthrough is the amount of the data processed and monitored at machine pace and monotony. Any good veterinarian could have achieved the same result given years of time and large army of support personal. This is clearly the task that should be assigned to machines, big monotonous work with large/"meaningless" data set and constant calculations without errors.

The question is, why don't we do this with humans? Lets do it without any expectations, by collecting all kind of data from millions(billions maybe?) of people and feeding it to Azure/pattern recognition program. The data cannot be anonymous, since it should be correlated with individuals lifestyle/activities to make any sense.

After a year or so the big picture will emerge, explaining/diagnosing/predicting/fixing lots of unknowns in our life and health. Can we detect mental disease, terrorists, suicidal tendencies, laying/honest politicians or sociopaths? The sky is a limit and after a while the health monitoring device would be mandatory and welcome addition to all societies.

The Doctors as professionals

Society is mistaking doctors for scientists and this misconception is the root of slow progress of our medical knowledge. Doctors are technicians or conduits of application of our medical knowledge The profession is grueling, demanding and  hardly leaves any time for creative thinking or god forbid innovation/research.  Doctors are very smart people but they do not have education or scientific discipline to discover anything complex in their field. Basically all the innovation and advancement in medicine during last century was initiated by scientists and engineers who kind of drugged the medicine out of dark ages into our reality. All this just happened without any intelligent design or some super program sponsored by government or investor.
Doctors education does not even educate then about basics of feedback theory and this is a sad fact.
Here is the scenario:
1. Person visits a Doctor and gets diagnosed (misdiagnosed?)
2. Doctor prescribes some medicine, that will have long list of side effects that even the creators of the drug don't anderstand
3. Treatment fails, patient survives
4. Patient goes to different Doctor

Pattern is repeated from step 1-4 until patient dies or some Doctor actually cures him and cure is very infrequent.
What is wrong with this picture, assuming everything is not an answer?
The obvious problem to me is that all those Doctors  that failed to cure/diagnose have no clue what happened to the patient! There is no feedback or evaluation mechanism!
All those doctors go on to imagine that they are gods gift to humanity and they helped so many people. Doctors support their mental state with this self delusion to continue practice medicine otherwise their own conscious would not allow them to do so. In the process countless lives are ruined and undue pain and suffering is induced onto humanity. For some reason barber-surgeons come to mind and realization that we are not far from it yet. Electroshock therapy anyone? Just to erase your mind from this sad state of medicine.

Doctors are most caring, sensitive individuals and it is not their fault we find us here!

Pharmaceutical Companies

 Make no mistake, those companies are here to make money at any cost. They spend large sums of money to just protect intellectual rights to their products, on research of new cures but not much on improving their results. What I mean is their end product simply sucks. After billions of dollars investments they end up with some inferior medicine that is marginally/questionably better then its predecessor and comes with equally dangerous side effects, and not just one or two but a huge list of them. We all have seen those bottles of medicine that comes with folded brochure that lists dozens of side effects, including death, cancer, internal bleeding and heart attack. And than as a joke they add, consult your doctor before using it. What can the poor doctor help with if pharmacological giant failed to solve.
From pure business perspective they are doing fine, but from intelligence perspective they are the dinosaurs that are about to get extinct. The companies know this but cannot help it since they relay on skills of Bio-Engineers.

There are exemptions like in case of Merck distributing free medicine to cure river blindness, but examples are few.

Bio-engineers

This profession is considered highly lucrative and bio engineering was big news years ago. Part of bio engineering is genetics and we are constantly improving our understanding but do not yet have big picture. This stuff is complex and very hard to achieve incremental results. Don't know much about Bio engineers but considering their products/medicine I am not impressed with achievements of this profession.

What to do to improve

There are several major steps we need to implement before any significant changes are realized in our Medicine.

Improve our Medical Knowelage

One way to improve would be collection of large data from as many sources possible for medical reasons, anonymity is guaranteed and that data cannot be used by anyone else. The data should be fed into analytics engine for patter recognition and correlated with individual data. Patter recognition and data collection should be handled by machines and correlation by scientists. The data that needs to be collected is ambient temperature, humidity, body temperature, heart rate and yes the steps.

Another step we can do to further improve our understanding of human body is by examining/analyzing/cataloging all the microorganisms living inside us, gross I know. This should be large, continual effort and correlated with individual data like above. Until we know who our friends are, we cannot kill our enemies!

Introduce Accountability for our helthcare

We are not talking about frivolous lawsuits! We just need to make sure that we truck each and every patient in the world. Every visit to a doctor should generate feedback for previous doctors. Each doctor should be graded based on their cure dispensing rate in their particular field.
We are talking about simple database and trucking enforced by law. The technology to implement such system is over 20 years old so we need to help our little brothers, Doctors, to catch up.

Mandatory education for Doctors on how to use the system or give up his/her license!

Eradicating parasites

If this was a trial and you were in the jury, would you not shout guilty if this was a trial for common cold? Enough said, the viruses must perish and we know how, just need some little push to kick them off one by one.

Cancer treatments

Please stop the torture! Sometimes it is better to die then live in agony. This is the most embarrassing chapter in our reality now, like the electroshock therapy was in previous century. We poison sick people and call it chemotherapy, we irradiate them and call it Radiotherapy, then we slice and cut them almost blindly and call it surgical intervention. Why don't we introduce more cures like bullet therapy, or rope treatment? Those would be much humane in many cases.

And sometimes we rush to disperse those "therapies" before we diagnose. Like recent study shows that mammograms are useless. Can you imagine how may women lost their breasts and undergone through painful "treatment" because of false positives? Many cancers can be cured if detected early and it all boils down to data collection.