The Age of Scientific Wellness: Why the Future of Medicine Is Personalized, Predictive, Data-Rich, and in Your Hands

Eye-opening account of the current state of ‘disease-care’ – and what we can do about it now
What makes this book remarkable (and recommend-able) is that the authors make a careful balance between what modern measurements can now do (including sequencing the genome, looking at circulating proteins and metabolites, as well as measuring your gut microbiota) and how these measurements have the potential to revolutionize healthcare. This is not a claim made lightly, and in this well-documented book that points to primary scientific literature, there is an emphasis of being able to tackle many of the most difficult diseases (chronic, multifactorial ones such as diabetes and Alzheimer’s) in its earliest phases, where a healthy to disease transition is taking place, often well before conventional symptoms (and diagnoses) are made.They start the book off with valuable context: that of the existing healthcare paradigm, built around a prior age of infectious disease with one cause (and a medication-driven cure). The healthcare challenges of today, however, are for diseases with many causes, without a single medication to cure them – whether diabetes, cancer, or heart disease. This premise proves valuable as the book then covers what wellness-centered healthcare looks like (with their own personal experience with a healthcare startup called Arrivale that tracked some 5,000 individual’s health through a four-year timespan, complete with bi-annual blood and stool sample collection) in addition to big data analysis to closely look at health to disease transition.Then they cover a concept called biological aging, which is how you are aged in comparison to your chronological age. It turns out the science backs this up, and there are several available methods available today. I heard a podcast interview of Drs. Hood and Price, and Dr. Hood says his biological age is 15 years below his chronological age, and Dr. Price says it is 10 years for him. Even though the science has yet to ‘prove’ this biological clocks being correct, there is plenty of scientific data (again going back to the extensive scientific annotations) to back up their case.Neuroplasticity and ‘brain training’ is then covered, a very interesting (and personal) chapter on Alzheimer’s Disease, another important chapter on dementia and one on cancer (and including new tests for early cancer detection), along with a chapter on the importance of AI (as these “dense data clouds” of personal biomarker and metagenomic data are humongous for each individual).The last chapter is the most important (and consequential) – where do we go from here. The answer? Longitudinal, large-scale population health surveys such as one that Dr. Hood is espousing called the Human Phenome Initiative. (Phenome is scientific for all of your traits – all the things that can be measured about you.) It will be similar in scope to the NIH’s All of Us initiative – 1M individual volunteers – but goes beyond genome and electronic healthcare records, to routine blood sampling every six months for a 10-year timeframe, and stool sampling (for gut microbiome analysis) to monitor real-time disease transitions.For me, I’m taking away some very solid actions as a result. I’ve hesitated to get my genome sequenced (or genotyped with a service like 23andMe) due to the perceived lack of usefulness as well as privacy concerns, but I learned through this book that we’ve reached the point where combined with blood testing (i.e. biological age testing) I could get a wealth of personalized recommendations; genotype combined with polygenic risk scoring in addition to greater understanding of what particular genotypes mean in the context of my own metabolism, holds real potential in either things I need to be aware of (whether susceptibility to certain diseases) or things I need to take care of (such as particular supplementation or dietary recommendations). So I’ll be signing up for both a whole-genome scan, as well as a biological age test, and counseling that combines the two.Secondly, the section on nutritional supplements was eye-opening, and revealed a few supplements I had not heard of before and will look into them further. The authors are not dogmatic on any of their recommendations, I’ll have you discover these for yourself.And lastly, I’ll be volunteering for the Human Phenome Initiative whenever it gets off the ground. After reading several of the Arrivale papers this work is really convincing.

Timely and important book
I was admittedly reluctant to buy this book because of my distaste for Big Pharma and the de-humanizing, dis-empowering, and wasteful administration of “health care” in the United States. To my pleasant surprise, the book eschews these failed models and calls for a paradigm shift toward preventing chronic diseases rather than waiting until patients are already sick. The new paradigm also puts more autonomy and power into the hand of people to positively affect their health through actionable lifestyle modification before (largely useless or harmful) medical treatments and drugs become necessary.

Inspiring, forward-looking, data-driven book
This book was particularly meaningful for me. It touched upon the most recent advances in personalized medicine but also painted a picture of what the future will look like. While we are not all the way there yet, it does provide some actionable items to move forward. It inspired me to get a fitness tracker & make some changes in my health. I’m looking forward to more to come in the future!