Eric Topol Quotes

The stethoscope for listening to the heart is over. It's obsolete.

- Eric Topol

Medicine is still all about treating populations, not people - one-size-fits all treatments and diagnoses.

- Eric Topol

We're all essentially surgically connected to our smartphones, and we're still in the early stages of realizing their medical potential. But they should be a real threat to the medical profession.

- Eric Topol

There are certain mutations you can find across cancers in different organs.

- Eric Topol

For diabetes in particular, we know there's a relationship between lack of glucose regulation and complications like blindness and kidney failure. So if you were diabetic and you knew that you could get your glucose in a tight, normal range just by adjusting your lifestyle, wouldn't that be great?

- Eric Topol

Our brain starts a long degenerative arc beginning around age 40.

- Eric Topol

If you sequence a cancerous tumor, you should be able to tailor the therapy according to the root cause of the cancer. But it has taken so long to do the sequencing - which also requires time to prepare the samples and interpret the deluge of data that comes out - that the patients are already undergoing therapy by the process if over.

- Eric Topol

The ability to diagnose an imminent heart attack has long been considered the holy grail of cardiovascular medicine.

- Eric Topol

Chemotherapy is just medieval. It's such a blunt instrument. We're going to look back on it like we do the dark ages.

- Eric Topol

I use a portable pocket ultrasound device instead of a stethoscope to listen to the heart, and I share it with the patient in real time. 'Look at your valve, look at your heart-muscle strength.' So they're looking at it with me. Normally a patient is tested by an ultrasonographer who is not allowed to tell them anything.

- Eric Topol

Where today people surf the Web and check their e-mail on their cell phones, tomorrow they will be checking their vital signs.

- Eric Topol

The problem is that it takes physicians so long to accept a radical change. And the lag is unacceptable.

- Eric Topol

I have had my genome fully sequenced and have learned a great deal about which medications I would respond to and which might or would induce major side effects, along with knowing many medical conditions for which I'm particularly susceptible.

- Eric Topol

For people who have heart disease, statins are great. But if all you've had is high cholesterol, what you're doing is taking this 1/100 chance of getting a benefit and offsetting it with 1/200 chance of getting diabetes.

- Eric Topol

I love information. I can never get enough. I get bored easily.

- Eric Topol

About half of all people don't take medications like they're supposed to.

- Eric Topol

The U.S. government has been preoccupied with health care 'reform,' but this refers to improving access and insurance coverage and has little or nothing to do with innovation.

- Eric Topol

When you're asked to have a CT scan or a nuclear scan, do you know how much radiation that involves? How many of those sorts of scans have you already had? Is it necessary? Is there an alternative? I don't think many people know about that.

- Eric Topol

When I went to medical school, the term 'digital' applied only to rectal exams.

- Eric Topol

It's infrequent that people are rail thin yet have high blood pressure.

- Eric Topol

There are estimates that 2 to 3 percent of cancers in the U.S. each year are engendered by exposure to repetitive imaging.

- Eric Topol

Seeing your glucose every minute on your phone, it really changes your lifestyle. You ask yourself, 'Do I really need that piece of cake? No, because I don't want to stress out my pancreas.'

- Eric Topol

The digitization of human beings will make a parody out of 'doctor knows best.'

- Eric Topol

Not only can consumers handle their personal genetic information, but they are getting genomically oriented and anchored about such data.

- Eric Topol

The digital world has been in a separate orbit from our medical cocoon, and it's time the boundaries be taken down.

- Eric Topol

For some men, the inflammation of their arteries is a result of really low good cholesterol.

- Eric Topol

Warfarin is the drug the medical community loves to hate.

- Eric Topol

Of course, the medical profession doesn't like D.I.Y. anything.

- Eric Topol