Ronald Bailey
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.
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