Health paradigm for the 21st C, part 2

Okay, Part 1 of this post was precipitated by the Society of Participatory Medicine’s request for ideas about what members would like to see them do. I talked about my take on the whys and wherefores of participatory medicine. This post is a list of eight activities I’d like to see supported by the Society for Participatory Medicine:

1. Develop an actionable plan for the goal of enabling each individual to become his or her own primary care authority for 90%-95% of health incidents.

Primary care docs want to go specialist because it pays more, so why not elevate the individual to the primary care provider and boost the physician to the role of spcecialist involved as needed? A few months ago during the health care debate on The Health Care Blog I saw a remark (by a physician, as I recall) that about 80% of health events are handled by the individual: cuts and minor trauma, headaches, colds and flu, aches and pains, nutrition, supplements, upset GI, menstral issuses, and on and on. The “drugstore” often the supply center for first-line of public treatment. What if that percentage could be elevated to with the right tools and support to 90% or 95%?

2. Develop a plan for building well-developed, well-funded information support systems specifically to support lifelong personalized health learning and decision making.

The internet is little more than a platform for informaiton storage and cheap distribution with content kluged together from unrelated sources.  However, people have already adopted the internet as a primary source for health information (Pew Internet Surveys). But so far there is no well-funded health resource base specifically designed to achieve anything like the goal above. The internet is a hodgepodge of sites and information of variable quality. WebMD and other commercial sites provide general content as part of their marketing platfrorm. Wikipedia is one crowd-sourced way to compile informaiton, but its quality has been challenged and the whole enterprise criticized. Medepedia, with content from academics from reputable institutions, arose pretty much to be an authoritative alternative to the noise of internet health information, but it’s primarily a reference work and does not seem to have figured out the public involvement part. There are thousands of nonprofit and government sites with bits and pieces of information, but there is no sign of a national commitment to an architecture designed to empower the public with knowledge in a person-specific or engaging way. The only site I am aware of that seems withing striking distance of the comprehensiveness of necessary is the National Library of Medicine.  Their Mediline and PubMed resources might be a precursor to a more innovative way of supporting personal medicine.

The information from a well-designed and well-networked system should contain a mechanism that helps everyone understand what medical information is “evidence-based” and what the certainty level  of current evidence is. The substantiation of information should be on a dynamic, constantly-updated basis. The system should also help people learn that scientific process works toward greater certainty over time and grey areas with less than 100% proof are a necessary part of understanding medicine.

3. The integrated health knowledge network suggested in iten 2 should take a systems approach to human biology and medicine.

In the 20th century the human organism was disassembled for study by segmentation and reductionism. Specialized areas of medicine, nonprofit organizations, and governmental expert agencies took off in their own directions too. The result is a very fragmented picture of health that still dominates today. Knowledge supporting personal health engagement should put the puzzle of health together. The knowledge base of health and life education should follow guidelines that support clarification of how various sub-systems of the human organism play a part in the function or malfunction of the whole.

4. The approach to participatory medicine should be founded on the principle that learning about health is a lifelong matter.

Information should be communicated and made available on an as-needed or just-in-time basis throughout life but within a cohesive systems framework. As I pointed out in an earlier post, parents are beginning to accumulate and electronically record information about children at birth. With the cost of full genome sequencing plummeting it is likely that the process will eventually become routine at birth. It does not seem out of the question that health knowledge can start at birth with a full family genome and health history as a basis for baseline health assessment and risk estimation.

From the outset, children are curious about their bodies and many teachable moments are possible if appropriate information is provided in a personalized, situation-specific way. A whole range of age-appropriate information should utilize current and future technology to find innovative ways of interfacing health information with many learning opportunities throughout life. Games, avatars, social networks, and virtual environments could be employed to engage various groups. People cannnot and need not become experts in all aspects of medicine, but over time they can become experts about themselves and the health matters that are issues for them as indicated by genomic data, family history, race and cultural variables. Needless to say, a health support information system will need to have as its mission staying abreast of and innovating with emerging technology.

5. Facilitate the evolution of an open sytem of quantifying sensors and devices that measure many aspects of bodily function, health status, fintess, and consumption that can be seamlessly integrated with the knowledge network, EHRs and informed by personalized health models.

The problem with life is that we are born without a “dashboard” for our bodies and with no operating manual. When health problems arise the symptoms such as pain, swelling, and other sensations are often too late to prevent acute illness. And our bodies provide few perceptible clues about the percursors of chronic conditions.

Health 2.0 activity has shown that there are many entrepreneurs eager to supply devices and services related to a personal approach to health. But technology standards committees need to be established or coordinated so that devices and data supporting participation can avoid what has happened in the electronic medical record industry. Interoperability and integration are essential, and the particpatory movement will be inhibited if these characteristics are not incorporated from the outset. Open data standards, open applications, and open media standards are necessary to put together the systems of communication, data recording and transmision, security, and social networking that are sub-systems of the greater vision.

The price of admission for entrepreneurs for participatory medicine should be open standards all around. Consumers should be advised not to support products that cannot be integrated with other components of the greater system (motto: “Homie don’t play ‘dat”). An encouraging development in this regard is the Open Mobile Health Exchange . Nevertheless, ongoing advocacy in needed to keep standards open.

6. Drive a counter-culture movement that encourages the US population to reset its expectations of the market economy from tollerance of the current state of health irresponsibility to one of health-benefit.

The market system in the US is health-indifferent; it is not accountable for focusing on consumer products that are designed to exploit basic cravings regardless on long-term personal or societal health burdens. In fact health corruption and health correction are complementary streams of income. Billions of dollars are spent on the design and marketing of products that contiribute to illness only to be answered by products and services marketed to compensate and bring us back toward health. It’s an amazing wealth engine where the right and left hands wash each other.

The weird thing about health “responsibility” in US society is that, with regard to food and drink, only consumers, not producers of goods, are considered responsible. If we over-consume a product designed and marketed to maximize our consumption, the producer is not held accountable. That’s the way it used to be with tabacco, but we changed the preception of responsibility about tobacco between the 1970s and the end of the last century.

A similar cultural change is needed about food and drink. We have a start;  producers of suggary cereals and high fructose corn syrup drinks have been criticized for marketing them to children. Similar accountability — or at least  social scorn — is necessary for other consumables. Producers have gotten away with saying, “Hey, we don’t force you to drik all that corn syrup. It’s your fault, not ours.” Perhaps as the extreme cost in dollars to US society from obesity and its consequences generates even more pain we’ll be less willing to swallow the denial of culpabiity that the marketplace hides behind.

7. Advocate for the funding developemntof human biological system models that can be personalized so that a constant stream of information may be analyzed and used as a source of near-real-time feedback about our health status and behavior.

We need sophsticated human systems biology and computer health models based to the best scientific information. They should be designed so that health data from our genomes, family history, lifetime health history, and from daily activity can be combined to form a personalized profile or algorithm. Our own model — embodied perhaps as an avatar — could be constantly available to interpret data and give us feedback or status reports. Such personalized models could also set the appropriately personal context for health information and learning.

8. Work to support augmented reality development for an environment that will enable us to get information on-the-fly about what our options are for the things we eat and drink.

Institutional support is needed to creating an augmented reality environment of information for restaurants and markets via databases that support easy access to informaiton about what we’re consuming. Bar codes, wi-fi, Bluetooth,  RFID tags  and new future technology should allow smartphones to immediately obtain information about the nutritional content of meals in restaurants and packaged products in markets. I already use an app called “FoodScanner” that uses the iPhone camera to scan package barcodes, look them up on a remote database, and provide me with the nutrition information food products are required to have on the package. The information can be saved for future use, but the whole process is pretty klutzy. A system that automatically grabs infomation and checks it against a personal profile of stuff to avoid is not hard to imagine.

When I was  in school at ~13-years-old we had “hygiene” class in which we had to learn the parts of the body (“pipes and plumbing,” as it was known) and their functions. Then in high school we boys got movies and slide shows with “the coach” to graphically show how disgusting VD and pregnancy are. That was supposed to deter us from sex until marriage. It was also  all I got from public education about health. I suppose it was somehow supposed to enable me to maintain my health for life.

The steps I outlined above is, I hope, a more robust approach and consistent with technology and lifestyles of the near future. The iGeneration evidently no longer sees a reason to fill their heads with generalized infomation with less that obvious personal applicability. They already know they have the option of getting appropriate information at the time it’s needed. Perhaps they’re already aware that the infomation they’ll be exposed to during their lives will be changing constantly. Making this situation lend itself to a healthier population is going to require many elements working together.

The things I’ve suggested also are simply ideas for a long-term process. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from a career in public health it is that change tends to be a lengthy, nonlinear process requiring tolerance for uncertainty and unexpected developments. Change is a career, not a project.

Health paradigm shift needed for the 21st C, part 1

The Society for Participatory Medicine recently asked its members (I’m one; it’s open to the public) what they wanted from the society. The request prodded me to think about what might be undertaken to advance “participatory medicine” or “health 2.0” which are similar if not identical concepts. Others might be better at identifying distinctions.

The purpose of the Society for Participatory Medicine is: “To accelerate change in the culture of healthcare to a more participatory model, through leadership, advocacy, information and tools.” I think it’s fair to say “participation” means a more even role between doctors and patients in making decisions in medical situations. If you go back to my parent’s generation (mid-twentieth century) typically doctors held the information, authority, and decision making power in virtually all medical situations. People didn’t expect to need to know much because, if you got sick, you went to the doctor and he — typically, he — told you what was wrong, what he’d do about it, wrote the prescriptions, and sent you to the hospital if necessary. If you lived in that era you know that generation gratefully accepted the doctor’s direction and didn’t ask many questions. The TV show Marcus Welby, MD, dramatized the medicine of the time.

But, as I described in an earlier post, a portion of the population was not satisfied with the situation and began to question established practices. This was especially true of women not too happy with male-dominated gynecology. In the 1970s, as I recall, emphasis on “informed consent” began to grow. When I went to work in cancer public health in the early ’70s it was shocking to learn that some doctors did not tell some of their patients they had cancer because the physicians judged the patient couldn’t take the shock. The patient participation movement has really accelerated since the internet broke the dam on medical information. The public has gotten much freer access to information from sources other than their personal physicians, which, in may cases, wasn’t much.

That’s the past, the 20th century model. Where can we go from here? Organizations are pushing the envelope, but I’d like to entertain a few ideas for the 21st century that would shift health and medicine in a more radical way.

In earlier times much of health care was the domain of women: an extension of their maternal, nurturing role in the family. The late 19th and the 20th centuries saw the rise of “scientific” medicine. (For an excellent history get hold of sociologist Paul Starr’s, The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The rise of a sovereign profession and the making of a vast industry. The title alone says a lot.)  The complexity and volume of medical knowledge as well as the financial advantage of professional exclusivity eventually resulted in the consolidation of medicine into the system of medical education, licensing, legal authority for therapeutic practices, and self-policing that dominates today. And the swelling of a huge medical industry focused almost exclusively of physicians as the kingpins and market managers reinforced the doctor-centered system. The responsibility for learning and applying medical knowledge placed doctors in a paternalistic position while patients remained in a passive, unschooled position.

I would not challenge the notion that medicine has made great progress under the current system, nor that the trend to super-specialization of medical knowledge will continue. But I have to ask: Should relative passivity and health ignorance of the public and inability to make health judgments remain our aspiration going forward? Are we not capable of knowing much more, of participating more fully in  effective health behavior? That includes accepting the power and responsibility for our own wellbeing. In the past when information was more difficult to distribute relatively low health literacy might have been more understandable and acceptable, but surely we can do better in the future.

My position is that we have already more powerful knowledge tools than even a couple of decades ago and those tools are growing in capability as we speak. There are seeds of a potential to put individuals in a much improved position if we are willing to build systemic support and institutions that augment our abilities as much as the institutional infrastructure that supports the medical profession. It is possible if we have the will to put much greater innovation into it. I believe we can up our game as “patients” — the noun we have accepted — and relate to physicians and scientific/medical institutions in a more capable way.

This is not just some power grab. It seems to me taking charge of our health is not only possible, it is essential. The pathetic political struggle currently going on around “health reform” in the US shows how powerless we’ve allowed ourselves to become. While various interests use politicians as sock-puppets to stage a drama about the future of medicine, we citizens have become primarily ineffective, frustrated spectators. But I hope many folks have learned that we cannot continue to let our most precious possessions — our health and that of our family — remain in the hands of others. And we’ve learned our financial wellbeing is intimately tied to our health status. Serious disease has too often become a financial catastrophe aw well.

Well, I’ve spent a lot of words on the history and context behind what I think we ought to consider for a health promoting environment for the future. In the next post I’ll get down to grinding out the main points.

feel good, look good, and live forever!

I spent almost all day yesterday listening to the health care reform summit. It triggered some recdollections.

Years ago — was it 15 or 20? — I attended a couple of conferences at Berkeley about managed care, the solution du jour for relentlessly rising health care expenditures. On one panel was Leonard Schaeffer, former president and CEO of WellPoint. (I emphasize “former” to insulate him from the heat the company has taken recently for double-digit premium increases to some customers.) He mentioned that he was often asked at meetings, “What to people want?” with respect to healthcare. His standard reply was: “They want to feel good, to look good, and to live forever.”

He said this only partly in jest. As the CEO of a major payer company he had seen that there was heavy demand by customers to pay not only for treatments alleviating physical ailments but also for treatment to relieve their distress, to make them look more like they thought they should, and to forestall the ravages of age and the ultimate insult, death. The boundaries of the three categories were so ill-defined that it was possible to expand what people wanted reimbursement for indefinitely. This resulted in the administrators dilemma: satisfying the customer’s expectations without utterly exhausting the bank.

Apparently not much has changed. Our expectations for medical relief remain largely unbounded. Perhaps it’s because after WWII we came to expect medical miracles: antibiotics that knocked down infections, vaccines that eliminated polio and communicable diseases, surgery that seemingly made anything possible. I recall watching open heart surgery on fuzzy black and white nationwide TV broadcasts because it was such an astonishing development. After that we sent men to the moon.

When I went to work in the cancer field we had an organizational slogan: “We want to wipe out cancer in your lifetime.” “Wipe out” as in totally eradicate. Seriously! It wasn’t a disingenuous promise; it only reflected the limits of what we knew about the complexity of the disease at the time. People in the cancer field had to let that notion go by the wayside as we began to see that terms like “cure” and “eliminate” were perhaps over-statements when dealing with a disease that stemmed from malfunctions of the most basic biological processes of living things.

The aim of much of the cancer community today is to shift more cancer cases into chronic conditions (as opposed to acute, lethal episodes). Well, that’s progress and perhaps an inevitable step in greater mastery of the disease; but one of the most serious problems we have in health care today is the rising cost of chronic diseases. A study published in Health Affairs a week ago indicated that half of the increase in Medicare spending 1997-2006 was due to increases in prevalence of cases of 10 diseases or to increased cost of treating cases. Cancer isn’t even in the top 5 of the chronic disease list…yet.  One of the biggest surprises of my career was that the financial barriers to state-of-the-art treatment would become a challenge nearly as serious as the intricacy of the disease itself.

We have a difficult time in America discussing pragmatic matters like to cost of protracted care in the same conversation with the good of “saving lives.” Extending life is taken as an unalloyed good. You can become a pariah for mixing the two (i.e., examining comparative effectiveness becomes “death panels” or “pulling the plug on grandma”). I don’t know how many times over the years I’ve listened to well-meaning people advocate efforts requiring a lot of resources with the argument that, “If we can save just one life it will be worth it.” Have I just become too callous when I react: “Uhm…maybe some good can be  done putting the resources elsewhere”? In my entire 40 years in public health I never heard a serious discussion about the unintended or down-side effects of doing whatever it takes to retard illness.

But it’s not a discussion that can be avoided much longer. During the health care debate yesterday everybody seemed to agree on a couple of things: 1) we needed reform for humanitarian reasons, and 2) the continued relentless rise in costs will bankrupt us. One of the Republican senators said something like (I’m paraphrasing), “In a perfect world we’d want everybody to have everything, but we can’t afford this.” I’m a lifelong, unrepentant liberal, but I thought that was a pretty straight statement, one that resonated with me. The truth of  that specific assertion can be argued either way, but it is a matter we have to address. It’s bigger than just the price of the the current health fix. We need to have some frank talk about allocating our less than infinite resources for many benefits that might be achieved. I’m hoping that the baby boomers — of which I’m one — currently heading into the nexus of this issue can bring forth some of the brashness with which we’ve talked about many things in our time (drugs, sex and rock ‘n roll, etc.) and break down the taboo about discussing the realities of life, death, and the price of peanuts.

Using a couple of self-monitoring tools

I’ve mentioned before that I’m experimenting with e-tools to help me stay on track with my health goals. I’m also doing it to be able to comment on the emerging fields of personal health records and m-health (mobile health). Today I’ll be commenting on an iPhone app I use all the time to track my walking — iTreadmill — and a free graphing program I found about yesterday thanks to @accarmichael  — Tableau Public.

iTreadmill is a popular pedometer using the accelerometer in the iPhone. The app allows the recording of pace and time during a walk or run and calculates other measures.

• Average Pace (pace over entire walk/run)
• Average Speed
• Calories burned
• Distance
• Pace (current pace, pace over past 30 secs)
• Speed (current speed)
• Step Count
• Strike Rate (step rate, in steps/min)

I think iTreadmill does a good job recording these parameters, at least sufficient for my needs. They claim to have proprietary technology (trademarked PocketStep) that is supposed to enable the device to measure your movements whether your iPhone is in your pocket, clipped to your belt, or held in your hand. The stride parameter can be adjusted to fit with your stride. The app senses when you stop at, say, a stoplight and detects when you’re moving again so the elapsed time adjusts for interruptions. Pretty much everything else is calculated off your number of steps and time.

The data for each occasion can be stored so you can see your history. The latest version allows you to graph distance, steps, calories burned, and time over the past week, 30, 90 or 180 days. You can export the history by emailing the history file to yourself.

That’s a sore point with me. The FAQ says you can get a “well formatted” table from the email by copying it into a spreadsheet. But all the data from each event is just a string of characters with variable spaces between data elements. It isn’t comma-delimited so you can’t easily separate the data into fields for calculations. I tried various search-and-replace strategies to break it into separate fields but gave it up as too time consuming to be worthwhile. I’ve twice sent emails to iTreadmill asking for help with data formatting and suggesting they build in a better export format, but I’ve gotten no reply or results so far. I ended up manually re-keying my data from iTreadmill into OpenOffice spreadsheet: not my idea of how to facilitate better health behavior.

Indeed, I’m wondering if poor responsiveness isn’t pretty standard for the apps business. I’ve gotta think many of the 100,000 apps for the iPhone are done by one or two developers working out of their mom’s basement. I suspect limited support for technology is going to plague the e-health, m-health movement for some time to come.

That takes me to the next tool: Tableau Public. For me an essential quality of supporting my health program is being able to gather data with a minimum of fuss, store it, and manipulate it with ease. However, the overriding characteristic of the app world — as has been the case with IT for decades — is fragmentation and lack of common standards by which data from a variety of sources can be conveniently combined into something satisfactory. My goal is to export data from the apps I use, store it as a database (with or withyout the help of HealthVault or Google Health) and visualize it in a way that tells me how I’m doing. Since I’d manually re-keyed my iTreadmil ldata I was pleased to learn a versatile, sharable program for visualization has become available. I figured it was an omen to begin shareing my data on this blog, limited as it is.

I started only a couple of days ago with Tableau. It’s a poweful tool that’ll take me some time to master. You need to download a free desktop program. With it you open your spreadsheet or database from within Tableau, and it interprets your sheet to do a lot of the work of getting it ready for display. The resulting display files are stored “in the cloud” on Tableau’s servers. But the site sets the graphics up for embedding into various web apps such as blogs. I’ll be gathering more data, and it appears that Tableau may be a platform for integrating data into a coherent story. So, such as it is, here’s my graph for walking in January and February.

The distance walked is up and down, but when I put in the trend line (dashed line) at least it’s up. That’s encouraging!

Health 2.0: four decades of experience

As I’ve posted before, I’m interested in Health 2.0. I say that from the perspective of someone with nearly 40 years of experience in social science and cancer public health. I hope my long-term perspective can add something to the discussion of this interesting trend, especially the recent discussion kicked off by the Susannah Fox and the infamous “Darthmed” concerning the value of Health 2.0.

If you’ll indulge me a little I’d like to step back to when I studied sociology in the late 1960s. The conventional methodology of sociology was survey research. Surveys as a social science tool go back to the 1940s, and many of the field thought we knew enough to reduce prejudice, poverty, crime and other social ills. I was in a PhD program in sociology and fell in with some rennegrade sociologists who were skeptical. They maintained surveys were not a sound basis for verifiable “scientific” sociology. They argued that the data had too many poorly understood variables in linguistics, scales that were not consistent with statistical mathematics, and data gathering interaction effects to claim it was a verifiable body of knowledge. Also efforts to apply sociology wasn’t getting much in the way of results. I ended up dropping out of the degree program because I realized we didn’t know enough about the platform — about consciousness, brain function, semantics, and behavior drivers — to have a solid scientific theory of human behavior.

I went to work in local public health for a couple years and then entered a school of public health to get an MPH in health education. I remember having debates about the ethics of using what some students though was such powerful behavior change technology that we needed to have rules for using it. You’d think we were talking about nuclear energy! I had to laugh and say, “Look, a year after you get out of here you’ll be willing to hit people over the head with a two-by-four to get them to change their health behavior!” I’d already gotten some experience with how difficult “good” change could be to produce.

When I graduated I eventually went to work for a nationwide cancer organization just as the first smoking cessation programs were being developed. Techniques of education and group support were being used to encourage people to give up cigarettes. It seemed simple: give rational people solid infomartion about how bad cigarettes were for them and they’d be motivated to give them up. It turned out not to be so simple. After years of effort and tweaks to programs it became clear that, as an old friend from Mississippi told me, “the juice ain’t worth the squeezin'”. It became clear we weren’t going to solve the smoking problem one person at a time. Because “activism” in the 1960s and ’70s was associated with confrontational marches in the streets protesting the war in Vietnam, most nonprofit organizations wouldn’t touch anything political like “advocacy” as we know it. Finally, however, some militants began to articulate “non-smoker‘s rights”. Before, the social norm was that smokers had a “right” to smoke in public and it was rude to ask them not to. Eventually the first excise tax on cigarettes was passed in California to increase their cost. Jacking up the price began to get behavior change. The social context began to change as well. People began to recognize that smoke hurt not only the smoker but anybody around, and non-smokers had a right to protest. Eventually higher taxes and laws to restrict smoking in public were passed across the country. It took a couple of decades but the social perception of smoking changed from accepting to negative and mass behavior change began to come about. When I look back over about 35 years of smoking wars I’m kind of amazed that there has been as much change. Because it took so long it seemed for years like nothing was happening. The key, at least for smoking, was monetary disencentives and– after perceptions changed — restrictive laws. So what lessons am I suggesting?

• Individual change is difficult to get, especially if the society doesn’t have attitudes that reinforce the change.
• You need to work on societal attitudes and even laws that may positively or negativel sanction the problem you’re trying to solve. Billions will be spent by commercial interests to maintain the behavior.
• It takes a long time to achieve much change because there’s resistance on the individual, group, and economic levels.
• Giving citizens more power and authority over their health today is part of a long trend. Another quick example: in the1970s the Women’s Health Collective wrote a book called Our Bodies, Ourselves because women were dissatisfied about how male gynecologists were treating them. It was a signature piece of the feminist movement that produced real change. I think “our bodies, ourselves” is a good slogan for all of us. To my mind Health 2.0 is another step in this tradition.
• Health 2.0 is oriented to a lot of technology. By itself technology will not produce much change, but over time it can become a great platform to facilitate communication and information but only once social perceptions and attitudes change.

The technology of Health 2.0 is still primitive. It’s mainly, as far as I can see, preliminary, disconnected equipment and software. It needs to mature into an integrated system that works seamlessly for people, has supporting institutions at all levels, has just-in-time information at the user’s fingertips, and is premised on a model where the person is in charge, not the doctor-institutions we’ve adopted for the last couple of centuries. Health behavior change has never been easy. There’s nothing new in that situation. Health 2.0 fans need to keep moving ahead as early adopters and enthusiasts. But really visible results are not likelhy to emerge for years. It may take a new generation to see widespread adoption of someting that would be a real paradigm change. You’ve got to have patience and understand that all this will be in constant evolution. Whatever behavior you’re looking for needs to be well interlocked with complementary systems.

Taking the measure of healthcare “elephant in the room”

I called this blog The Vortex because it seems to me we’re in the midst of some really big forces that’ll send us spinning. One of those — here in the US and elsewhere — is demographics. Specifically, the denoument of the Baby Boom generation — of which I am a member — is going to cause perhaps even more turbulence than our advent.

I seldom read George Will’s column in the WashPo because I almost never agree with his perspective on things, but the one he published yesterday brings up the issue of the cost of care of the elderly and its impact in the next couple of decades. I think the situation is of great concern even if I don’t agree with Will’s conclusions about what to do.

The column quotes data about the increase cost of care with age from “Forecasting the cost of US Healthcare” in  the American Enterprise Institute’s newsletter.  The author, Robert Fogel, cites what I think is pretty compelling data about the cost of the end-of-life and, by implication, the possible total cost of the expiration of my generation.

…In this figure, the burden of per capita healthcare costs, which is based on U.S. data, is standardized at 100 for ages 50–54. Figure 1 shows that the financial burden of healthcare per capita rises slowly in the 50s, accelerates in the 60s, accelerates again in the 70s, and accelerates even more rapidly after the mid-80s. The financial per capita burden at age 85 and older is nearly six times as high as the burden at ages 50–54. Notice that the financial burden of healthcare for ages 85 and older is over 75 percent higher per capita than at ages 75–79. However, the physiological prevalence rates (number of conditions per person) is roughly constant at ages 80 and over.

Costs rise, even though the number of conditions (comorbidities) per person remains constant, because the severity of the conditions increases or because the cost of preventing further deterioration (or even partially reversing deterioration) increases with age. It should be kept in mind that standard prevalence rates merely count the number of conditions, neglecting both the increasing physiological deterioration with age and the rising cost of treatment per condition.

Mr. Fogel goes on to discuss various ways the curve could play out over the next couple of decades and ends with what I think is an amazingly optimistic forecast that rising US incomes is going to inspire greater use of biotechnology that results in longer life, fewer chronic conditions and — by some calculus unclear to me — less than devastating total health care cost. In other words, not to worry about the hockey-stick graphs of huge long-term costs, and healthcare is a great business to be in. Read it for yourself and see what conclusion you reach.

This information is cited by George Will as part of a point I think is worth considering. The health care data sets up a contrast between the health care expenditures ahead for the US versus the very large expenditures being made for education in China as a stride toward having by the world’s largest economy by 2040. Will cites another article by Fogel in Foreign Policy titled: “$123,000,000,000,000*” — Fogel’s estimate of the total GDP of China in 2040. That’s a number intended to rock your world that will put China at 40% of world GDP while the US produces only 14%. So China replaces the US as the world’s economic hegemon less than 30 years from now.

The idea doesn’t make me shudder as badly as it would some other poeple, but I think the conundrum identified is valid: how is the US to allocate it’s resources? How much is going to be allocated to health care for us Baby Boomers versus how much is to be allocated to development of the next generations in a highly competitive world? That dilemma faces indivicual families as well. If grandma doesn’t have the money for things not covered by Medicare like long-term-care (which can run thousands of dollars per month), are you doing to wipe out the kids’ college funds?

During the recent health care reform debate calls for evidence-based treatment or comparative effectiveness were greeted by the demagogic  charge of “death panels.” Nevertheless, decisions about resources will be made, even if they’re only the path of least confrontation. This elephant-in-the-room isn’t going away, and it’s big.

Tipping-point to government as #1 health payer is at hand

Today a burst of news about the cost of health care in the US, now and in the future, has hit the front pages. An AP report in PhysOrg.org says that yesterday Medicare’s Office of the Actuary released estimates indicating that by 2012 half of the health care in the nation will be paid for by federal and state government though Medicare and Medicaid. Earlier projections put the crossover in 2016.

There are two main reasons for this: 1) Baby Boomers will start hitting the Medicare system in 2011, and 2) the recession. The recession has thrown people out of work and out of health care plans onto Medicaid.

The report estimated that in 2009, the United States spent $2.5 trillion for health care, with government programs – mainly Medicare and Medicaid – paying $1.2 trillion. Employer health insurance and various private sources covered the other $1.3 trillion. Even as the economy shrank because of the downturn, health care spending grew by 5.7 percent from 2008. Spending by government grew nearly three times faster than private spending, closing in to overtake it.

In other data reported in Health Affairs looks at a little differently.

In 2009 the health share of gross domestic product (GDP) is expected to have increased 1.1 percentage points to 17.3 percent—the largest single-year increase since 1960. Average public spending growth rates for hospital, physician and clinical services, and prescription drugs are expected to exceed private spending growth in the first four years of the projections. As a result, public spending is projected to account for more than half of all U.S. health care spending by 2012.

So…government in one form or another is set to become the biggest payer of all in health care, ready or not.

My self-tracking: the prequel

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’m doing my thing with adopting a permanent exercise and diet regimen. (Who isn’t?) This program has evolved. Starting back in July 2009 I wanted to get on a self-improvement track. At the same time I was getting interested in what I think is a very significant trend: health 2.0, participatory medicine, e-medicine or whatever else people are calling it.

I started by setting up accounts in both Google Health and HealthVault. Neither is very suitable for what I wanted to do: keep track of my exercise and diet. Both are designed to enable people to set up computer accessible versions of the records their doctor or health provider has. Fortunately I’ve been in good health most of my life, and I don’t have any complicated records of disease episodes or conditions to put in there — even if I wanted to. I say “if I wanted to” because it became apparent that getting records into these PHR (personal health record) systems either requires hooking-up with a limited number of providers, using go-betweens, or just getting your paper records and manually transferring everything in. It didn’t seem worth it in my case.

However, I discovered that HealthVault offers the option of linking your medical records account up to the MSN Health & Fitness site. Health & Fitness is specifically for recording exercise and food consumption. The data and graphs are then accessible in HealthVault.

Good idea, I thought, so I started recording what I was doing in the fitness form. The Health & Fitness recording system calls for you to make a daily exercise and diet plan. Then you keep track of what you actually eat and do for exercise that day and enter it at day’s end. The program then compares your goals with what you really did. That was a problem for me because I never know what I’m going to eat, and I wasn’t embarking on such a controlled diet routine that I was going to control it by, say, preparing and packing my lunch to the office. So, for me, the food consumption planning was useless.

Also, the interface for diet planning and recording is poor. You can search for a food or drink and select from alphabetical drop-down menus. But no matter how many times you have the same thing there’s no way to get a shortcut to your commonly consumed items. Finally, the exercise planning and recording is set up around running or gym workouts. All I wanted to focus on was walking. Believe me, I’m way beyond the six-pack-abs stage.

After about three or four days I realized this wasn’t going to be something I wanted to do for weeks much less years. There was way too much “paperwork” involved through an interface that wasn’t very helpful. Indeed, I ran smack into what I think is a very common obstacle for getting people engaged with health routines: doing the manual labor of keeping track of your progress. There are notorious hurdles in the way of people keeping up sustained health routines, and this is a big one.

I realized pretty quickly that I needed a better way of gathering my data. Coincidentally my cell phone contract was up for renewal, and I latched on to what I hoped (or rationalized) would be a big step forward in convenience of recordkeeping: the iPhone. That was the next phase on my self-tracking saga, and I’ll go into using a smartphone in more detail in the next installment.

White blood cell vs the bacterium

While pursuing a favorite pastime — stumbling in Stumble-Upon — I stumbled across something educational as well as amusing. On a site called Maniac World there is a video posted of a white blood cell chasing a bacterium. I won’t spoil the ending, but, man, that white blood cell is determined!

If you watch it ask yourself at the end: Who were you rooting for, the cell or the little bacterium?

Epigenomics in breast cancer

In my last post I talked about how empigenomics is a hot topic in understanding how genes get expressed in organismic development and how errant development can lead to disease. Well, here’s a specific case where epigenomics plays a role in a common form of cancer: breast cancer.

An article about research on Physorg.com — my favorite science news site — reports how epigenomics plays a role in breast cancer. The interesting thing is that, to understand it, you have to realize that there’s a kind of cellular double-back-flip involved. Let’s see if I can spell this out.

1. There is a “signaling pathway” called tumor growth factor beta (TGF-beta) that gets over-expressed in some advanced cancers: in this case breast cancer.
2. TGF-beta sustains the activity of an epigenetic molecule called DNA methyl transferase 1 when a cancerous cell divides and produces offspring cells. The combination of the two factors is key to sustaining the progression of the cancer because they block the expression of genes that have been turned off in the process of turning normal cells into cancer cells. In this case the “epigenetic environment” is essential to enabling the cancer promoting process to be passed on to new cancer cells.
3. But if the TGFR-beta can be blocked it causes the methyl transferase — the epigenetic factor — to fade away. With the epigenetic factor reduced the offspring cells re-expresses normal genetics and retard the cancer characteristics.

In my last post on epigenetics I mentioned that epigenetics is ordinarily thought of as passing temporarily acquired factors from one generation of an organism to the next. But epigenetics happens also at the level of cell generations, and acquired, abnormal cancer characteristics need to be passed from one generation to the next for cancer cells to stay cancer cells through several generations as tumors grow.

So there you have it: epigenetics at work in cancer. But all this blocking and unblocking in order for cancer to be sustained opens up the possibility it can be disrupted by a drug and stop the disease.