Calcalist Interview, June 2019

Prof. Lloyd Minor, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Stanford University, told Calcalist that “the emphasis on health should be placed on predicting and preventing rather than healing diseases after their eruption. Professor Minor explains how predicting technological tools will improve patients’ health. Collaboration with Facebook is required for this to happen and why the treatment will eventually come from a virtual doctor. 

What is the great challenge of the medical system? 

The system’s large money is invested in the treatment of heart problems, diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and it is invested in patients who are constantly coming out of hospitals because their health is deteriorating all the time…In other words, when we talk about the cost of health and access to health, it is to a very small part of the population.”

How do you deal with it? 

We need to ask not how people are cured, but how we can make people healthy, so our vision is Precision Health, and we’re not talking about personal medicine, because the goal is to keep people healthy.

Customized health care should focus on predicting, preventing, and relieving disease. The order of things is important, because the emphasis must be placed on prediction and prevention. So far, these two dimensions have not received the emphasis, and the current system is focused on healing diseases after they broke out.

How do you predict disease? 

Protecting healthy citizens starts primarily from influencing their social and behavioral environmental variables, which are responsible for 70% of a person’s health.” The address and focus of an American citizen are the best variables for predicting his life expectancy, and they will predict this in statistical probability Higher than its genetic code.

How do environmental variables affect reality? 

The technology is very influential in our lives, in all aspects, except in the health world, even in the press, you have a lot more influence online than in print today, and that was not the case a decade ago.

But so far, we do not see the same tremendous impact on health, and we will see it in the near future, we will begin to receive information about our situation in a different way than we are accustomed to, and we will be able to follow our health situation with devices that we will not feel.

For example? 

Gathering information from new sources and remote medicine will be significant changes.” As a plane today is very much controlled by pilots, and it sends information and monitors continuously by remote systems, so too will medicine. 

We are not far away, but in the US it is hard to promote technological innovation in medicine compared to other sectors of the economy, and we will have to overcome this difficulty. Incidentally, the situation in Israel is much better than ours in this aspect.

Article of interview in Calcalist