The future of preventative medicine is in the blood. “On Red Alert” challenges the conventional wisdom that more widespread diagnostic preventative medicine will be an easy shift in healthcare and will be dominated by genetic testing.
The story follows a patient taking a new comprehensive blood test based on one used by pharmaceutical companies to monitor a vast array of reactions and markers signaling problems in the body. The test journey not only shows how this test works, but opens the reader up to deeper questions over the future of predicting disease, and how and whether society values such advances.
Serious chronic disease could be bubbling under the surface years before symptoms emerge. But healthcare systems have favored spending money on treatments rather than new ways to detect these signals. There is little economic incentive in healthcare for preventative medicine.
Moreover, the blood – what it carries, and what it communicates to the body – is under-appreciated as the best hope for real-time diagnostic and preventative medicine. Sophisticated understanding and testing of the blood could be far more instrumental in changing healthcare and saving money on disease than much more hyped genetic testing. But the current system’s priorities could leave it beyond reach.