Eric Topol quotes:

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.'

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I went to medical school, the term 'digital' applied only to rectal exams.

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

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

We're all essentially surgically connected to our smartphones, and we're still in the early stages of realizing their medical potential. But they should be a real threat to the medical profession.

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

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

Warfarin is the drug the medical community loves to hate.

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.

A lot of the diagnosis and monitoring functions will be done through little devices- smartphones- by the patient with computer assistance. So it's a real big change in the model of how we render healthcare.

I am prescribing a lot more apps than medications these days.

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

Medicine is incredibly ritualistic.