Decision Tree

Thomas Goetz new book The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine is being released for sale on February 16th. I wrote a post on O'Reilly Radar about the book, Kent Bottles wrote about it on the ICSI Healthcare Blog, and Susannah Fox also wrote a wonderful piece on ePatients.net.

Everywhere you turn over the next couple of days you will be hearing about this book. It is a great read and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in the future of healthcare. As Thomas points out in his Decision Tree Blog:

I want to address some Twitter kibbitzing that these ideas are simplistic, naive, or somehow dangerous. I take some assurance that so far, this chatter comes from people who haven’t read the book – because the book itself goes to great lengths to explore both the promise as well as the perils and challenges of engaging in patient-centric healthcare (challenging both for the patient and the system). There is ample evidence presented in the book; the bibliography alone runs to 15 pages. Of course, I’ll answer this head-on when I have the chance. But broadly, I’ll offer this:

There is hope in the book, yes; there is a simplicity to the idea, indeed – but naive or simplistic it is not.

My advice - read the book before you start complaining about what you think it says.