Edge of Medicine: The Human Experience behind the Technology That Will Change Our Lives by William Hanson

Product Details

Synopsis

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.

Kirkus Reviews

An enthusiastic account of high-tech advances that may or may not revolutionize medical care. Hanson, director of the Surgical Intensive Care Unite at the University of Pennsylvania, begins with a profile of his pioneering work as a "doc-in-the-box," where he and his team sit before monitors, alarms and audio-video links to oversee ICU patients in hospitals across a wide area. Using cameras that zoom in on trouble spots, they can instantly contact the appropriate personnel. The practice may seem dehumanizing, but it dramatically reduces complications and makes efficient use of the increasingly scarce supply of ICU specialists. American radiologists dislike night work, so computers now send X-rays across the world where wide-awake doctors immediately send back their reading. Experimental computers read brain waves to guide wheelchairs and artificial limbs but also send signals to the brain to produce vision and hearing. Today's devices work crudely, notes the author, but progress is inevitable. Surgeons are operating through smaller holes, which converts major surgery into minor surgery, so patients suffer less pain and post-op misery and recover more quickly. Using robotic technology, some surgeons sit at a console and operate through an even smaller hole. Hanson admits that this procedure takes longer, requires extensive training, sometimes produces more complications and usually costs more. But he insists that future developments will improve matters. Many of these spectacular ideas exist only in the minds of researchers. Fortunately, Hanson excels in describing the history of current high-tech advances-artificial heart valves, stem-cell therapy, pacemakers, insulin pumps-whose miracleswe take for granted and whose drawbacks are steadily declining. Readers looking for solutions to America's healthcare crisis will be disappointed, but they will enjoy this spirited, feel-good look at an area of medicine that's making progress. First printing of 35,000. Agent: Eric Lupfer/William Morris Agency

Biography

William Hanson M.D. is an anesthesiologist and chief of intensive care at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School as well as an Associated Faculty member of the Computer Science Department at Princeton University, where he has taught a course on computers in medicine. He is often quoted in USA Today and US News & World Report, and has been profiled in Popular Science and New Scientist. He lives in Philadelphia, PA.