• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

33 Charts

  • About
    • What is 33 Charts?
    • Bryan Vartabedian MD
  • Blog
  • 33mail
  • Foci
    • Social/Public Media
    • Physicians
    • Patients
    • Hospitals
    • Information
    • Process/Flow
    • Technology
    • Digital culture
    • Future Medicine
  • The Public Physician
Physicians, Technology

The Human Quest for a Single Measure of Health

July 5, 2019 By Bryan Vartabedian · Reading Time: 2 minutes

Humans are simple creatures. We’re always looking for a way to reduce our condition to one measure. Check out James Hamblin’s latest Atlantic piece, The Power of One Push-up. It details the quest for the best single measure of health. It’s entertaining but maybe better suited for a 20th century audience.

The problem is that our world is too complicated. Humans are too involved to simplify. The days of boiling down health to simple cause and effect have passed.

David Weinberger in his new book, Everyday Chaos — Technology, Complexity and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility, has it right..

As our predictions in multiple fields get better by being able to include more data and by tracking more interrelationships, we’re coming to realize that even systems ruled by relatively simple physical laws can be so complex that they are subject to these cascades and to other sorts of causal weirdness.

A new paradigm for something as fundamental as how things happen affects not just business, government, education, and the other large-scale domains into which we traditionally divide our world. It pervades our understanding of everything.

Our rules, principles, and laws in medicine for years offered a rudimentary way of seeing the world — shortcuts for making sense of stuff beyond anything we can grasp. Machine learning is forcing us to confront the incomprehensible intricacy of medicine and the human body. We thought we understood why things happened the way they did. But everything is being reframed.

As it turns out, there may be a single measure of health, but don’t expect it to be uncovered by a human and don’t expect your doctor to understand it.

Until we are comfortably able to leave the data to the machines, Hamblin’s pondering a single measure of health makes for entertaining reading.

Image via NASA on Unsplash

Related Articles

  • Technology Changes Doctors and Patients
  • Silicon Valley Has a Health Problem Problem
  • Questioning Health Apps

Tagged With: Artificial intelligence

Related Articles

  • Technology Changes Doctors and Patients
  • Silicon Valley Has a Health Problem Problem
  • Questioning Health Apps

Primary Sidebar

Bryan Vartabedian, MD

Bryan Vartabedian, MD
Bryan Vartabedian is the Chief Pediatrics Officer at Texas Children’s Hospital North Austin and one of health care’s influential
voices on technology & medicine.
Learn More

Popular Articles

  • The Fate of Fired Cleveland Clinic Resident Lara Kollab
  • Cures Act Final Rule – How It Will Change Medicine
  • 12 Things About Doximity You Probably Didn’t Know
  • Should Physicians Give Their Cell Phone Number to Patients?
  • Doximity Dialer Video – Telemedicine’s Latest Power Player

Sign up for 33mail newsletter

Featured Articles

Reactive and Creative Spaces

Doctors and the Endemic Culture of Permission

Yes, Doctor

Health Care and the Visibility-Value Continuum

The Case for New Physician Literacies in the Digital Age

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Footer

What is 33 Charts?

With a mashup of curated and original content that crosses the spaces of digital health, media, communication, technology, patient experience, digital culture, and the humanities, 33 charts offers unique insight and analysis on the changing face of medicine.

Founded in 2009 as a center of community and thought leadership for the issues doctors face in a digital world, 33 charts was included in the National Library of Medicine permanent web archive in 2014.
Learn More

Foci

  • Digital culture
  • Digital Health
  • EHR/Health IT
  • Future Medicine
  • Hospitals
  • Information
  • Patients
  • Physicians
  • Process/Flow
  • Quality
  • Social/Public Media
  • Technology

Copyright © 2023 · 33 Charts · Privacy Policy