What is the Future of Diagnostic Medicine?

I told all this to Dr. Graves as we sat down to go over the results from my physical. He was pleased. I asked whether Greenbrier would one day offer these tests. He said he sure hoped so. As of now, there wasn´t much interest from patients, but more important for Graves, the available tests still can´t look for the kinds of widespread diseases that primary-care doctors regularly come across. He thinks those tests are at least 5 or 10 years down the road, an opinion shared by those seeking to advance personalized medicine.

And then he got to my tests. My CT scans showed an irregular left kidney. Might be a good idea to follow up with a urologist, Graves advised, and instantly I thought of what Mehmet Oz said about discovering things that looked like problems but were not. There was absolutely nothing clogging my arteries. No tumors had formed in my body. (Of course, these scans looked for existing tumors, not for the cells that could cause them to form.)
Then Graves said something I will never forget.

â€You´re in good shape,†he told me. â€There´s just too much of you.†I am 80 pounds overweight. My cholesterol is borderline high. My glucose levels are flirting with diabetes. I am a prime candidate for a heart attack or stroke. At that moment, sitting there across from Dr. Graves, I had to face the reality that, until the more powerful tests come online, I am back to where I was before starting down this road: fat. I had been conveniently ignoring the fact that I could have predicted what will be wrong with me just by looking in the mirror. Mutated genes aren´t all that can damage a body. A body can be damaged by eating French fries twice a day, by eating chicken wings twice a week, by eating cookies for breakfast, by eating a lot of General Tso´s chicken.

I asked Graves what to do.

â€Lose 10 pounds,†he said.

â€Just 10?â€

â€After you lose 10,†he said, â€then lose 10 more.†And so on. It was all very simple. For now.

Michael Rosenwald wrote about high-tech stalking in the November 2004 issue.