Eric Topol

“Warfarin is the drug the medical community loves to hate.”

“It's infrequent that people are rail thin yet have high blood pressure.”

“For people who have heart disease, statins are great. But if all you've had is high cholesterol, what you're doing is taking this 1/100 chance of getting a benefit and offsetting it with 1/200 chance of getting diabetes.”

“For some men, the inflammation of their arteries is a result of really low good cholesterol.”

“The digitization of human beings will make a parody out of 'doctor knows best.'”

“The U.S. government has been preoccupied with health care 'reform,' but this refers to improving access and insurance coverage and has little or nothing to do with innovation.”

“Seeing your glucose every minute on your phone, it really changes your lifestyle. You ask yourself, 'Do I really need that piece of cake? No, because I don't want to stress out my pancreas.'”

“Chemotherapy is just medieval. It's such a blunt instrument. We're going to look back on it like we do the dark ages.”

“The digital world has been in a separate orbit from our medical cocoon, and it's time the boundaries be taken down.”

“There are estimates that 2 to 3 percent of cancers in the U.S. each year are engendered by exposure to repetitive imaging.”

“I have had my genome fully sequenced and have learned a great deal about which medications I would respond to and which might or would induce major side effects, along with knowing many medical conditions for which I'm particularly susceptible.”

“There are certain mutations you can find across cancers in different organs.”

“For diabetes in particular, we know there's a relationship between lack of glucose regulation and complications like blindness and kidney failure. So if you were diabetic and you knew that you could get your glucose in a tight, normal range just by adjusting your lifestyle, wouldn't that be great?”

“When I went to medical school, the term 'digital' applied only to rectal exams.”

“Our brain starts a long degenerative arc beginning around age 40.”

“About half of all people don't take medications like they're supposed to.”

“I use a portable pocket ultrasound device instead of a stethoscope to listen to the heart, and I share it with the patient in real time. 'Look at your valve, look at your heart-muscle strength.' So they're looking at it with me. Normally a patient is tested by an ultrasonographer who is not allowed to tell them anything.”

“If you sequence a cancerous tumor, you should be able to tailor the therapy according to the root cause of the cancer. But it has taken so long to do the sequencing - which also requires time to prepare the samples and interpret the deluge of data that comes out - that the patients are already undergoing therapy by the process if over.”

“Medicine is still all about treating populations, not people - one-size-fits all treatments and diagnoses.”

“When you're asked to have a CT scan or a nuclear scan, do you know how much radiation that involves? How many of those sorts of scans have you already had? Is it necessary? Is there an alternative? I don't think many people know about that.”