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The Edge of Medicine: The Technology That Will Change Our Lives | 
 enlarge | Author: William Hanson
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $14.16
You Save: $10.79 (43%)
New (29) Used (8) from $14.16
Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 62006
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 0230605753
Dewey Decimal Number: 610.28
EAN: 9780230605756
ASIN: 0230605753
Publication Date: October 14, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Experts agree that we are entering the Golden Age of Medicine, when our everyday experience of being ill and getting better will be more like science fiction than today’s routine trip to the doctor.
Bill Hanson, director of the surgical intensive care unit at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center and an inventor of medical technology, offers true-life and intensely intimate stories about the way biotechnology is changing people's lives.
• An electronic nose that detects infection, such as pneumonia, based on a person’s breath
• Robots with appendages that can feel their way around tissue, which will augment the hands of surgeons in the operating room
• Computer health wizards that will advise and prescribe through your home computer
• Computerized psychotherapists dispensing advice about emotional problems
• Telehealth software that serves as a monitoring nurse for difficult to manage chronic illnesses such as diabetes.
• Wheelchairs operated by reading electrical brainwaves for patients with severe neurological deterioration.
Bill Hanson describes the human genius that arrived at these amazing discoveries, and how innovators are working to take these feats to an even more technologically advanced level. And more importantly, he discusses what the human experience will be and how we can prepare ourselves for the moral and ethical challenges that these awesome changes will bring. This riveting and startling account will make us revise our expectations of our own mortality.
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| Customer Reviews:
A future definitely worth striving for December 6, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
There is nothing in the twenty-first century that is uninteresting, and after finishing this book the opinion that this is the best time to be alive is reinforced. The advances in medicine that were predicted to occur just a decade ago have proven to be a gross underestimate, as this book clearly shows. Its author is a physician, and also has the virtue of being a technophiliac, but the best part of his writing is his frankness in assessing some of the issues in modern medicine. Treatment modalities, surgical techniques, diagnostics, and prognostics are now more than ever being done with the assistance of technology, some of this technology being highly sophisticated and intelligent.
Genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, cognitive neuroscience, robotic surgery: these are some of the tools of twenty-first century medicine. The author details the use of some of them in the book, and it is amazing to think of just a short time ago they were viewed as purely science fiction. In fact what is being done now and in a few years makes the Hollywood imagination seem sophomoric by comparison.
The author though also goes beyond a mere reporting of technological facts, for he exposes some of the finagling and politics in hospitals in the United States. One example that particularly stands out is his opinion on the "successful" hospital, these being characterized by their collection of "certificates of excellence." They acquire these by what he refers to as the "parasitic" certifying organizations that arbitrarily define novel measures of excellence, and proceed to convince hospitals, through marketing or regulatory pressure, to conform to the artificial standards that they have created. This is a story that is repeated in other professions also, where "certifying" organizations survive only by false pretenses, by asserting that quality exists in a particular business without any justification as to why their measure of quality is better than others.
For those readers such as this reviewer that are not in the medical profession but have worked as analysts or developers perfecting some of the technology that is used by physicians, the author gives some very interesting anecdotes on everyday practice, particularly in surgery rooms. Some of what the author reports can rattle the unsuspecting reader. Indeed, it many instances it is very disconcerting to discover to what degree the surgery room and its personnel are "on the edge."
One can only imagine what things will be like in medicine a decade from now, due mostly in part to technological advances. But cognizance must also be made, and the author of this book does so, to the rising costs of healthcare. Regulatory and governmental agencies will no doubt result in challenging tradeoff issues in the years to come. But with personalized genomic medicine, automated surgery, networked diagnostics, and more data transparency it is likely that the future of medicine will be an exciting one, and one that every living individual hopefully will be participating in.
He's great -- heard him on the radio November 20, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I heard this guy on Terry Gross & Marty Moss-Coane. He was awesome. They don't make doctors like that anymore. At least I can't find them. I got a copy of the book from my husband and read it straight through. If you are interested in how technology is shaping the technical and human side of medicine, you will love this book. It's not often you run across someone who can relate Hypocrates to telemedicine.
this guy must be a genius November 18, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
A discussion for the layman about the cutting edge of medical technologies and their various future ramifications; the last chapter focuses on the most elemental technological tool - the human hand (actually the author's father's hand who was also a doctor), which puts the conflict of the entire profession of health care in a humane and sympathetic historical perspective
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