It’s a death sentence for some, a recipe for pain and anguish for others.

Just as science reveals new medical advancements that can halt pain and suffering, a wall of bureaucracy and outdated perspectives condemns patients to suffer needlessly, or sacrifice their lives.

Much of our medical system is based on treating diseases, not individuals. There are approved protocols for certain conditions, and should a physician or other healthcare provider stray beyond these protocols she exposes herself to malpractice and other liabilities.

Yet, advances in genetic research and other personalized medicine initiatives suggest there are significant differences between the ways that different people react to what we still consider to be the “same” disease or condition, and to the same treatments.

Likewise, the mindset of the entire pharmaceutical industry has been built around the quest for blockbuster drugs. In other words, the industry has operated like a Big Three auto company, chasing mass markets and steadily losing its competitive edge.

Government agencies, state and national laws, and insurance companies all “buy into” this mindset. To simplify things a bit, to get a new drug approved today, you essentially have to prove it will be safe for everyone. But evidence is piling up that one person’s wonder drug may be another person’s poison.

We need mechanisms that will allow researchers, healthcare providers, insurance companies and regulators to think and act smaller. If a drug isn’t safe for everyone, authorize its use for a subset of people. If “tailored treatments” prove to be effective for small segments of the population, allow such treatments to be approved without the time and expense required to approve “blockbuster” drugs.

I’m talking in broad generalities, granted, but that’s in order to make a simple point: people are dying - and suffering - needlessly. Why? Because we haven’t yet shaken the pervasive mass production mindset that has dominated our economy for the past century.

People far more knowledgeable and better connected than I have told me that personalized medicine isn’t even a part of the debate as America attempts to revamp its healthcare system. That’s outrageous. Without a personalized approach, the suffering will continue and healthcare costs will continue to rise.

Make no mistake about it. Mass production healthcare is nothing less than a premature death sentence for you and your loved ones.

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With nine trillion web pages (a rough estimate) and growing, the Web already overwhelms many of your potential customers. Companies need to reinvent the way they attract and serve customers.

One way to do this is by putting a Mindset button front and center on your site.

A Mindset button lets a visitor tell you in a single click what’s on their mind, right now. It is a pulldown menu from which visitors can pick one option.

For example, a high-end retailer might include the following options:
- Looking for the lowest prices
- In a hurry
- Try to match an existing item
- Exploring the latest fashions

Here’s the important part: once a person clicks on their choice, your entire site morphs to meet their needs.

“Looking for the lowest prices” could restrict any searches to items that are on sale, and it would highlight the best bargains.

“In a hurry” strips out all promotions and extraneous copy, and replaces them with an ultra-efficient product finder.

The choices your firm offers will depend on your business and the needs of your customers. This takes some real thought, but the effort will be worthwhile.

User interface experts may - at first glance - object to this idea. They generally like interfaces to remain consistent, a perspective with which I agree. But the Mindset button allows for consistent customization, in a single click. Every time a user clicks “in a hurry” on your Mindset button, the same interface would result.

This is a bigger idea than a single post can explore, but I hope you get the general idea…

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Amazing miniaturization technologies

January 11, 2010

A local company here in Connecticut, Valtronic Technologies, specializes in miniaturizing medical devices invented by other firms. In other words, they take great ideas and make them small enough to have revolutionary uses. Firms hire them to accomplish this.
Check out this slick Amazing Tales handbook.

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Quick! Find the best (obscure) iPhone app

January 8, 2010

There are somewhere between 100,000 and 125,000 iPhone apps. I use about 60 of them, and altogether have probably scrolled through perhaps a thousand on the App Store.
That means I’ve never seen the vast majority of apps. There’s just no user-friendly way to do this. Sure, you can search and/or browse for apps, but neither [...]

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How many illnesses are there?

January 7, 2010

What if there are billions of human afflictions, not a few thousand? What if our perception of illness has been over-simplified by the limitations of the human brain?
Surgeon and author, Dr. Atul Gawande, recently said, “A doctor today deals with 300 to 500 diagnoses.”
But there are signs that human diseases are far more complex [...]

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MIT’s Daniel Nocera on personalized energy

December 19, 2009

Daniel Nocera is swimming very hard against the current of mainstream energy research. While many scientists are figuring out how to scale up wind, geothermal or biomass systems, Nocera is focusing on “personalized” energy units that can be manufactured, distributed and installed on the cheap.

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Personalization in Brief…

December 17, 2009

There’s a good article on personalization versus privacy at BizReport. Email Insider has a nice post on the dangers of doing personalization badly. The article begins with this quote, “You are not my friends and I don’t want you to be my friends.”
SearchNewz raises the question of whether Google understands - or is sensitive [...]

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My “Personal” Pet Project

November 30, 2009

A little over two months ago, a cartoonist friend and I were wrestling with a book project that seemed like it was taking forever to complete. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” said Jim George to me, “If we didn’t have to work through a publisher and editor and publicist and…” You get the idea.
The next day, [...]

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Only one iPhone…

November 24, 2009

Last week, both my wife and daughter bought iPhones. They started out identical, but already are vastly different. My wife is mainly focused on logging her daily exercise routines and staying on top of her work. My daughter is focused on texting faster, discovering interesting new music, and waking up on time.
Already, the two phones [...]

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Add a dash of empathy, please

November 23, 2009

The New York Times reports that: a raft of new research in humans suggests that (the peptide hormone) oxytocin underlies the twin emotional pillars of civilized life, our capacity to feel empathy and trust. Reporting this month in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that genetic differences in people’s responsiveness to [...]

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