Difference between revisions of "Talk:Open Source Medicine"

Revision as of 02:03, 10 May 2011

This article needs more pictures!

Preventive medicine/ Public health

Medicine is not just about diagnosis and treatment – what about compliance and prevention? How does a culture make people eat more healthily, for example?
We sorta have the answers to Alzheimer's (meditation and turmeric), cancer (anti-angiogenic foods, garlic, turmeric), osteoporosis (weightbearing exercise, calcium and vitamin D), cardiovascular disease (omega-3, avoiding saturated fat, exercise), type-II diabetes (exercise, avoiding sugar), lung cancer (the obvious) and other degenerative diseases.

"Modifiable behavioral risk factors are leading causes of mortality in the United States."
"Approximately half of all deaths that occurred in 1990 could be attributed to the (lifestyle) factors identified."

Healthcare could be massively unburdened by a change in attitude, by people taking more responsibility. But people don't. A world where people eat a lot of fruit and vegetables, exercise two hours a week and meditate would be a world with maybe a quarter as much degenerative disease. I do not currently have any particular suggestions on how this might be achieved.--Balatro 23:22, 30 June 2010 (CEST)

Schools can give information, though I don't think there's any real evidence that telling someone to eat healthily at school means they'll eat healthily. Changing the public food environment (by doing the stuff discussed at the Food page) is a massive one too. Technology that give people metrics on their lifestyle (like Phillips DirectLife) is definitely useful.--Balatro 23:22, 30 June 2010 (CEST)

Interesting links

• http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/13/health/research/13alzheimer.html?_r=1
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqTkuaAykBw - Taking the results of a bunch of high-resolution body-scans and putting them together to create an accurate 3D model of the body

Open Medical AI

• Communicates with patient in natural language
• Turns every patient into a data point - bridges gap between clinical and research
• Accesses medical journals (with Natural Language Processing)
• Interprets scans (with machine vision)
• Analyzes test results, like proteomics, genomics, blood tests
• Simulations of biochemistry, proteomics
• Analyzes small, wireless sensors
• Makes decisions (with Bayesian logic, expert systems, machine learning)
• Integrated with an Electronic Medical Record system
• All this done by cloud computing

http://www.kurzweilai.net/ibm-to-collaborate-with-nuance-to-apply-watson-analytics-technology-to-healthcare

Unfortunately, most of the development in this field is being done by private companies; there is not yet a dynamic open-source project.