Eric Topol

The ability to diagnose an imminent heart attack has long been considered the holy grail of cardiovascular medicine.

I love information. I can never get enough. I get bored easily.

When you're asked to have a CT scan or a nuclear scan, do you know how much radiation that involves? How many of those sorts of scans have you already had? Is it necessary? Is there an alternative? I don't think many people know about that.

There are estimates that 2 to 3 percent of cancers in the U.S. each year are engendered by exposure to repetitive imaging.

For diabetes in particular, we know there's a relationship between lack of glucose regulation and complications like blindness and kidney failure. So if you were diabetic and you knew that you could get your glucose in a tight, normal range just by adjusting your lifestyle, wouldn't that be great?

The problem is that it takes physicians so long to accept a radical change. And the lag is unacceptable.

Seeing your glucose every minute on your phone, it really changes your lifestyle. You ask yourself, 'Do I really need that piece of cake? No, because I don't want to stress out my pancreas.'

The digitization of human beings will make a parody out of 'doctor knows best.'

For people who have heart disease, statins are great. But if all you've had is high cholesterol, what you're doing is taking this 1/100 chance of getting a benefit and offsetting it with 1/200 chance of getting diabetes.

For some men, the inflammation of their arteries is a result of really low good cholesterol.

About half of all people don't take medications like they're supposed to.

Chemotherapy is just medieval. It's such a blunt instrument. We're going to look back on it like we do the dark ages.

Our brain starts a long degenerative arc beginning around age 40.

The U.S. government has been preoccupied with health care 'reform,' but this refers to improving access and insurance coverage and has little or nothing to do with innovation.

I use a portable pocket ultrasound device instead of a stethoscope to listen to the heart, and I share it with the patient in real time. 'Look at your valve, look at your heart-muscle strength.' So they're looking at it with me. Normally a patient is tested by an ultrasonographer who is not allowed to tell them anything.

If you sequence a cancerous tumor, you should be able to tailor the therapy according to the root cause of the cancer. But it has taken so long to do the sequencing - which also requires time to prepare the samples and interpret the deluge of data that comes out - that the patients are already undergoing therapy by the process if over.

There are certain mutations you can find across cancers in different organs.

Medicine is still all about treating populations, not people - one-size-fits all treatments and diagnoses.

The stethoscope for listening to the heart is over. It's obsolete.

Not only can consumers handle their personal genetic information, but they are getting genomically oriented and anchored about such data.

It's infrequent that people are rail thin yet have high blood pressure.

Where today people surf the Web and check their e-mail on their cell phones, tomorrow they will be checking their vital signs.

The digital world has been in a separate orbit from our medical cocoon, and it's time the boundaries be taken down.

Of course, the medical profession doesn't like D.I.Y. anything.

I have had my genome fully sequenced and have learned a great deal about which medications I would respond to and which might or would induce major side effects, along with knowing many medical conditions for which I'm particularly susceptible.