In this ninth episode, Travis Christofferson provides an overview of his new future of medicine book “Curable: How an Unlikely Group of Radical Innovators is Trying to Transform our Health Care System”.

Read the transcript

He covers the great inefficiencies of healthcare and harm it’s doing to swaths of the patient population. He explains it’s too qualitative than quantitative, that incentives are misaligned. He offers hope by urging a shift to being data-driven.
Topics we discussed in this episode

The economics of Moneyball
Data can overcome our cognitive biases
Repurposing medications
Metformin
Huge disparities and variations of treatment
Veneration of a physician’s intuition has and still causes great harm
Complexity of medicine has outstripped the human mind ability to do it effectively
Fee for service model incentivizes unnecessary treatments
Prescribed medications are third largest cause of death globally
30% to 50% of all healthcare dispensed is over treatment
Doctors on salary change the way they practice medicine, aligning with patient more
Precision pre-operation antibiotic timing
Easily saving thousands of lives saved and billions of dollars
The need to get to the source of disease and use a preventative type of medicine
Unnecessary cancer treatment with early detection
The need to focus on wellness and lifestyle things like diet
Metformin and berberine
Going all the way disease upstream and tackling aging itself
Resveratrol
Interventions like ketogenic diet and fasting show great data, but no incentives due to lack of financial rewards
Most expensive treatments typically done even when there is no data to indicate that they are more effective
Healthcare is a parasite dragging down American business on the world stage
Amazon, JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway building their own healthcare from the inside out
Virta Health as an example of an emerging innovative boutique health system
Variation in treatment is not something that’s taught in medical school
Healthcare is disassociated from the way capital markets traditionally work
End of life chemotherapy and other aggressive treatments are evil
Lack of government investment in research to treat disease at source, the aging process itself
Water fasting before chemotherapy
Epigenetics
Our health is nowhere near as deterministic as we used to think just twenty years ago

Show links

Tripping over the Truth: How the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Is Overturning One of Medicine's Most Entrenched Paradigms by Travis Christofferson (Book)
Curable: How an Unlikely Group of Radical Innovators is Trying to Transform our Health Care System by Travis Christofferson (Book)
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis (Book)
Care Oncology UK (Website)
Care Oncology USA (Website)
Metformin (Wikipedia Entry)
Radical mastectomy (Wikipedia Entry)
Sapiens DS’ Brad Perkins on a new healthcare industry emerging from computing (Previous Episode transcript)
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler (Book)
An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back by Elisabeth Rosenthal (Book)
Intermountain Healthcare (Website)
Brent James MD (LinkedIn Profile)
Hacking the Software for Life by Brad Perkins (Conference talk video)
The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care and How to Fix It by Marty Makary MD (Book)
Metformin and berberine, two versatile drugs in treatment of common metabolic diseases (Paper)