Liberation of Medicine: Ronald Bailey's Lecture in Moscow
How technology is freeing both patients and physicians from the medical industrial complex
The libertarian NGO InLiberty.ru and Esquire Russia invited me to come to Russia and Ukraine in late March to lecture on the topic, Liberation of Medicine. As I earlier outlined, my talk described how medicine and physicians gained so much social, political, and economic power of the past century and half. Among other things, I described 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 then turned 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.
A video of my Moscow talk is now available below. It runs about 50 minutes.
