We are not treating trauma or infections anymore
We are facing new challenges, we need to develop a new type of medicine.
Working in the healthcare industry, not a single day goes by without hearing about chronic diseases.
Every public presentation mentions the rise of cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases.
It makes sense, they are 7 of the top 10 leading causes of death.
Answering the call
The rise in these diseases means that we aren’t doing a great job tackling them at a societal level at least.
Recently, we hear new words to face our confusion treating these diseases targeting our “metabolism”, often narrowing that down to the “powerhouse” of the cell, the mitochondria.
The reality is that we are facing diseases of another range and that we are trying to manage them with the system we developed to treat other families of diseases, trauma and infectious diseases.
Since our system works wonderfully for trauma and infectious diseases, we hope it will work for chronic diseases too, but it does not.
We may need to invent a new approach.
Reinventing healthcare : a series
Rome was not built in a day and I won’t be able to share my views in a single blog article so I’ll take the time I need.
I’ll cover this in a number of episode.
In this first episode, I’ll cover trauma and and infectious diseases and why we developed the approach we have now.
After that, I’ll dive into the specificities of chronic diseases, the tools developed to tackle trauma & infections, …
I’ll continue to unravel my vision of how we could reinvent our medical approach to answer these new diseases, from new scientific approaches to new devices type, studying what we should keep in what we have and what we need to develop to better answer them.
I’ll share different perspectives I have on the topic and a new framework I’m building and its core principles.
When possible, I’ll invite clinicians, nurses, paramedicals, researchers, entrepreneurs, and more to share their views.
This will take time and I’m happy to share my journey with you.
Let’s start by understanding what we have now and why.
Episode 1 : Trauma and infectious diseases
If we want to understand the system let’s start with the problem and work from there.
Understanding the problems
Let’s start with examples.
Robert fell on a metal rod and pierced his abdomen.
Pauline has caught a nasty bacteria and is feverish.
What can we say about both of them ?
They were apparently fine before the event.
They faced an event caused by an external pathogen - metal rod or bacteria.
They are now in a less comfortable situation → Painful symptoms
They want to go back to the situation before the event when they felt good.
They are very aware of the problem.
They are often looking for an expert to help solve this issue as they are no expert themselves.
→ They are most likely ready to listen to solutions from the expert
Okay, now we have an understanding of the situation.
The Requirements for the System
Doctors and medical professionals have a relatively clear set of requirements for their job.
Help a patient in pain
Remove / fix the consequence of the event
Study problems across many patients to be best equiped to handle each of them when they encounter one.
Act as an expert, guiding the patient while they execute the solution - surgery or medication.
This is translated in the “Hippocratic oath”.
This works wonderfully.
Nothing to say.
The doctors have studied cases of 100s or 1000s of different patients facing “metal rods in the abdomen” and a wealth of “nasty bacteria”, they know how to understand the problem and how to treat it.
Now my question is the following ?
Would this work for chronic diseases ?
This is already getting long so see you next week to take a look at chronic diseases.