The Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual event in which I had the privilege of participating several years back, is now convening in that rarefied Rocky Mountain air. Those heights perfectly suit the venue, in which thought and idea, examination and exhortation, are intended to take flight.
As they do so, one of the more popular destinations is, inevitably, the future. Even our scholarly examinations of history are of greatest current relevance in helping us sidestep repetition of well-worn folly. The deep thinking we do today is frivolous and futile unless it informs potential action, and cultivates favored opportunity. The Ideas Festival is willfully, and all good ideas are perhaps ineluctably, tangled up with tomorrow.
Tomorrow is the proving ground of hopes and dreams. Tomorrow is our legacy, and the foundation on which our children and grandchildren will stand as they aspire to, and conspire with, their own. Every promise made today will flourish or wither there. Tomorrow looms; tomorrow beckons.
What, then, might we say about tomorrow? Rather than risk the hazards of uneducated guessing, I will limit my prognostication to the realm of my protracted education: what will health care be like tomorrow?
We may reliably presume, I think, that tomorrow’s health care will be informed by science- that portion we now own, and the additional accumulations that will populate the space between now and then.
Invoking science, we may expect to see advances in genomics. We will learn ever more about the vast population of clinically relevant gene variants (polymorphisms), and applications of that knowledge. Genes will guide the selection of drugs and procedures, and figure ever more prominently in disease screening programs. Genes will inform advice about supplements, diet, exercise, and addiction. In 25 years, a prescription made in the absence of a genomic profile may well fall below the standard of practice. Tomorrow, health care will be very genomic.
Science also suggests that tomorrow’s health care will be highly robotic. Robotics is already prominent in operating rooms, but as robotic function becomes more refined and diversifies, applications to a wider array of clinical practices seems all but inevitable. In 25 years, the process of suturing your laceration, inserting your IV, and perhaps even attempting to resuscitate you from cardiac arrest could well be fully automated.
The writing is indelibly on the wall, or more accurately the console, that the future of health care will also be highly informatic. Mere information is yesterday’s news, clearly. The pain of transitioning to electronic medical records is widespread, and in many cases rather intense, today; tomorrow will show the return on this investment. In 25 years, complete medical records will be compiled for us all, and accessible whenever and wherever needed. Those records will link to empowering decision guides and resource inventories for provider and patient alike, addressing everything from the best treatment for a given diagnosis, to the most likely diagnosis for a given set of symptoms, to the appropriate timing and frequency of screening tests and biometric monitoring, to relevant resources in any given community.
Current science implies that the future of health care will embrace a broader understanding of the dividing line between us and them, and the immunology policing that interface. We are already well into the era of the microbiome, but our notion of the relevant demographics for that world within are evolving with dizzying speed. Future health care will involve a much enriched understanding of the village it takes to be a human being, including but almost certainly not limited to diverse bacterial strains. Managing the microbiome will be fundamental to the future prevention and control of allergy and asthma, autoimmune disease and cancer. It will pertain, if only slightly less fundamentally, to chronic disease in general, metabolic health, the control of inflammation, and perhaps even the aging process. In the service of microbiome management, the health care practitioner 25 years from now will at times seem part ecologist, at times, perhaps, even gardener.
And, of course, many scientific fields still inchoate today will bloom and bear fruit tomorrow. Among these are therapeutic uses of stem cells, cybernetics, bioprostheses, cancer prevention vaccines, and more.
What about my area of particular interest, lifestyle medicine? Given that lifestyle is already established to have the capacity to eliminate fully 80% of all chronic disease and alter the expression of our very genes, I predict with some confidence that the future of health care will offer nothing more powerful. Yet this is a power already accessible to us, and for the most part, consistently neglected. For that to change, we need no new Nobel Prizes or inventions, we simply need the resolve to turn what we know into what we do. It may be that dire necessity – such as diabetes affecting one in three of us – will obligate the invention of this very resolve, for we may not be able to afford any alternative. But we can’t really afford it now, either, and yet we keep using lifestyle to make ourselves sick rather than well.
For inspiration in this area, I am inclined to turn to science fiction rather than science itself. There may be some general advantage in this, given that the best science fiction writers have anticipated scientific advances with impressive fidelity, but my intent is more specific. I have one author, one work, and even one character in mind.
In his magnum opus, The Foundation Trilogy, acclaimed author Isaac Asimov gave us the character of Hari Seldon, inventor of the science of psychohistory. That non-existent (as of today) science blends psychology and mathematical modeling, relying on the momentum of behavioral patterns and decisions spread across human multitudes to predict the general course of future history. In Hari Seldon’s case, that prediction encompasses the fall and rise of galactic empire. We may be more parochial. What do our behaviors and decisions suggest about the future of our health, and its basic care and feeding?
They suggest, minimally, the relevant questions. Will we retain cultural anachronisms, or recognize that culture, unlike genes, is a medium of our own devising and thus adjustable as current exigencies warrant? Will our behavioral momentum owe more to Madison Avenue and the Military-Industrial Establishment, or the confluence of science, sense, and self-determination? Will the imperatives of epidemiology or the mutual exclusivities of ideology determine the nature of our practices, and the pace of our progress? Might we see past territorial disputes to a reconciliation of responsible use of evidence with responsiveness to the needs of patients that all too often extend off into areas where evidence runs thin, and convert holistic care from platitude to standard of practice?Ultimately, questions as yet unresolved will exert enormous influence on our future trajectory. But at least the questions are coming into view.
One of the more salient and satisfying attributes of the Aspen Ideas Festival is the hybrid vigor animating all that ideation. Experts are on hand to cogitate on economics and the environment, politics and technology, biodiversity and human rights, communication and climate change. A tent large enough for such far-ranging reflection at a site in the Colorado mountains raises another tantalizing question: are we inclined to erect so capacious a tent in our culture? Might the future allow for a grand confluence, in which we recognize there is just one health for people and planet alike, and that every choice we make related to policy, practice, or principle in almost any field impacts that one health for good or for ill?
I know only the answers I want, rather than those we’ll get.
Prediction is fraught with peril – for all of us mere mortals, and even for brilliant fictional characters like Hari Seldon. Invention, on the other hand, is replete with promise, especially when most directly targeted to genuine necessity. The danger there, as pointed out by Jared Diamond, is the temptation to go the other way, and let invention propagate necessity. In 2013, we have already invented many more glow-in-the-dark foods and labor-saving devices then were ever remotely necessary, but we have learned to need them all.
We might predict the future of health care, and more importantly health, based either on the inertia now prevailing, or the passive hope that perspicacity will prevail over so mindless a physical force. But the best way to predict the future is to create it rather than wait for it. Future necessities are rather reliably predictable; future inventions, far less so. The future of health care will most predictably be, therefore, just what we decide to make it.
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