Travis Christofferson

Future of Medicine Book “Curable” – EP09: Travis Christofferson (Author)

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Episode 009 87 Min 1689 plays

In this ninth episode, Travis Christofferson provides an overview of his new future of medicine book “Curable: How an Unlikely Group of Radical Innovators is Trying to Transform our Health Care System”.

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He covers the great inefficiencies of healthcare and harm it’s doing to swaths of the patient population. He explains it’s too qualitative than quantitative, that incentives are misaligned. He offers hope by urging a shift to being data-driven.

Topics we discussed in this episode
  • The economics of Moneyball
  • Data can overcome our cognitive biases
  • Repurposing medications
  • Metformin
  • Huge disparities and variations of treatment
  • Veneration of a physician’s intuition has and still causes great harm
  • Complexity of medicine has outstripped the human mind ability to do it effectively
  • Fee for service model incentivizes unnecessary treatments
  • Prescribed medications are third largest cause of death globally
  • 30% to 50% of all healthcare dispensed is over treatment
  • Doctors on salary change the way they practice medicine, aligning with patient more
  • Precision pre-operation antibiotic timing
  • Easily saving thousands of lives saved and billions of dollars
  • The need to get to the source of disease and use a preventative type of medicine
  • Unnecessary cancer treatment with early detection
  • The need to focus on wellness and lifestyle things like diet
  • Metformin and berberine
  • Going all the way disease upstream and tackling aging itself
  • Resveratrol
  • Interventions like ketogenic diet and fasting show great data, but no incentives due to lack of financial rewards
  • Most expensive treatments typically done even when there is no data to indicate that they are more effective
  • Healthcare is a parasite dragging down American business on the world stage
  • Amazon, JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway building their own healthcare from the inside out
  • Virta Health as an example of an emerging innovative boutique health system
  • Variation in treatment is not something that’s taught in medical school
  • Healthcare is disassociated from the way capital markets traditionally work
  • End of life chemotherapy and other aggressive treatments are evil
  • Lack of government investment in research to treat disease at source, the aging process itself
  • Water fasting before chemotherapy
  • Epigenetics
  • Our health is nowhere near as deterministic as we used to think just twenty years ago
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