Bailey Lecturing in Russia and Ukraine on the Liberation of Medicine
How technology is freeing both patients and physicians from the medical industrial complex
The liberal NGO InLiberty.ru and Esquire Russia magazine have invited me to lecture in a series that looks at alternatives to our social realities. In my case, I will be describing how medicine and physicians gained so much social, political, and economic power of the past century and half. Among other things, I will describe how the American Medical Association was instrumental in criminalizing abortion the mid-19th century; how they gained prescribing power as an early salvo in the century-long War on Drugs; the eugenic justification for compulsory sterilization of undesireables; the declaration of homosexuality as a "sociopathic personality disturbance" that needed medical treatment; and the Soviet political abuse of psychiatry.
I will then turn to how technologies are unfettering us from the centralized medical-industrial complex including IBM's Watson cognitive computing as ubiquitous diagnostician and treatment counselor; the power of open source sharing of genetic information; the immense promise of CRISPR gene editing; the Tricorder X Prize; home doctor visits via telemedicine; the proliferation of wearable medical sensors; and the speed up of clinical trials using health apps like those in Apple's new Research Kit.
If you're in Moscow today (March 24) I will be speaking at the DI Telegraph Building just blocks from the Kremlin at 8:00 pm. On March 25, I will be talking in St. Petersburg at the WEAVERS creative space at 8:00 pm. On Friday, March 27, I will be at the Fedoriv Hub in Kiev, Ukraine. Go to InLiberty.ru to register. See you there.
