Dynamic keynotes about the future of healthcare medicine & pharma

https://medicalfuturist.com/services

Dr. Bertalan Mesko, PhD is The Medical Futurist and the Director of The Medical Futurist Institute analyzing how science fiction technologies can become a reality in medicine and healthcare. A stylish keynote speaker known for his customized and uniquely spectacular presentations with hundreds of events under his belt including courses at Harvard, Stanford and Yale Universities, and organizations including the 10 biggest pharmaceutical companies.

He is one of the top voices globally on the future of healthcare technologies. He aims to prepare every stakeholder in healthcare from patients through pharma companies and government agencies for the upcoming waves of technological change in order to create democratic, rationalized and optimized healthcare systems together.

Interested in a keynote? – Book Dr. Meskó

Amazing narratives that inspire and engage audiences

Everything you need to know about artificial intelligence &, its impact on the future of healthcare!

We need a healthcare system that would keep an astronaut on Mars alive. Only with that can we keep on improving people’s lives. . . . .

https://thefuturesagency.com/people/dr-bertalan-mesko-phd/

Dr Bertalan Meskó, PhD is a medical futurist and one of the world’s leading biotech thinkers. He envisions the future trends of the intersection between medicine, healthcare and technology in order to prepare stakeholders for the upcoming waves of change.

As a geek medical doctor with a PhD in genomics, he supports empowered patients to rule the future of healthcare; as well as educate healthcare professionals to become guides in the digital jungle. His mission is to establish a mutually positive relation between the human touch and innovative technologies.

Bertalan is the author of ’The Guide to the Future of Medicine’ which featured in Amazon.com’s top 100 books. He has given over 500 presentations to Universities including Yale, Stanford and Harvard. Among the numerous conferences he has appeared at are the World Health Organization and the Futuremed course organised by the Singularity University at the NASA Ames campus.

He is a consultant for pharmaceutical and medical technology companies. His passion for improving healthcare with digital solutions and practical examples shines through his motivational talks in which he also showcases the wearable devices he uses to live a healthly and proactive life.

Dr Meskó is the managing director and founder of Webicina.com, the first service to curate the medical and health-related social media resources for patients and medical professionals. He is the author of the ’Social Media in Clinical Practice Handbook’ and the multiple award-winning medical blog ’Scienceroll.com’. He is the founder and lecturer of the ’Social Media in Medicine’ online and offline university course – the first of its kind worldwide.

His work has been acclaimed by CNN.com, the World Health Organization, National Geographic, Forbes, TIME, BBC, the New York Times, and Wired Science, among others.

He is a member of Mensa International and the World Future Society. Healthspottr.com included him in the ’Future Health Top 100’ list and he was included in the ’New Europe 100’ list in 2014. Several organisations have identified him as one of the top biotech thinkers with the biggest global impact – on numerous occasions!

BERTALAN ON THE WEB:

» The Medical Futurist
» The Social MEDia Course
» YouTube Channel
» Webicina
» Amazon Book List

DETAILS

City:

Budapest

Location:

Europe & UK

Language:

English

Fees:

Upon Request

The Medical Futurist Magazine Services Impact Research Our vision

https://medicalfuturist.com/our-vision/

https://medicalfuturist.com/

Our mission

We help understand
digital health technologies
to bring healthcare
into the 21st century.

WHO WE ARE

Book a keynote Check out our e-books

Articles

An Immunity Passport After COVID-19 And How Digital Health Can Support It

COVID-19 Takes a Toll on People in the Frontline

Will Medical Workers Deal With PTSD After COVID-19?

Countries have implemented digital surveillance to track the spread of the novel coronavirus

Your Data Privacy During a Pandemic

Life after COVID-19: What Will Change?

See more Recent Articles

Peter’s 80th Birthday in 2015 and Pauly the Car

Pauly the Car

This is what Peter wrote on the 19th May 2015:
“Last weekend was my 80th birthday and I had a really good time.”

And he says: “Our son Martin had even flown in from Melbourne for the weekend. He had to fly back on Sunday and we offered to take him back to the airport and take daughter Caroline home to Sydney.

The only way out from Wollongong, which is practically just a few meters above sea level, is up a steep road, Mount Ousley Road, across the Illawarra escarpment. It was only constructed during WWII by the Americans with their “can-do” attitude.

While going up the steep hill, Caroline was driving, the car seemed a bit sluggish. With four adult people on board, it did not seem unusual. But, we started to discuss the car’s age and Caroline suggested we could buy another car. Maybe not a new one, but at least a well preserved and reliable second-hand car.

Just seconds after discussing this, and not remembering Ilse’s advice, the car showed severe signs of illness. It lost power and no amount of gear-shifting would help. Soon enough, belching smoke poured out everywhere and we feared the engine could blow up. Our car looked more like an old steam engine than a 21st Century automobile. We decided to pull up at the turn-off to the Clive Bissell Drive where there is a convenient parking area. We thought of letting the car cool off and then continue.

Caroline did not trust “Pauly” anymore and rang a friend who lives in a neighbouring suburb. He came and Martin made it, just in time, to the airport.”

UTA’S DIARY

In my Diary from 19th May 2015 I found the following pictures:

Everyone could order what they felt like. For entrees there was Rollmops, or baked Camembert cheese or soup.
Most people got German beer from the tap. Ebony left soon after dinner with the two little darlings, our great-grandsons. There were later on 12 people left for the welcome drink, a nice sweet bubbly.

New South Wales Road Photo Gallery: National Route 1 (Mount Ousley Road)

http://www.expressway.online/oldsite/photogallery/roads/nsw/numbered/nr1/mtousleyrd/index.htm

Mount Ousley Road is the controlled access road that forms the link between the north and south sections of the F6 Southern Freeway. It also serves as the main route up/down the Illawarra Escarpment and the major entrance to Wollongong.

Mount Ousley Road was constructed as a defence route during the 1940’s to provide an easier route up and down the Illawarra Escarpment than the existing Bulli Pass and Mount Keira routes, and Mount Ousley Road was connected to the F6 at Gwynneville in March 1964.

Length:

16 km

Distance Sign

The first southbound RD sign on Mt Ousley Road. Note the very old Melbourne focal point, there is not a mention of Melbourne on a distance sign again for an enormous distance. This sign, located at Bulli Tops, is a direct remake of an old black sign. April 2006.

Image © Paul Rands

Thinking Errors and the Coronavirus

Martin Cohen (Twitter @docmartincohen) is a writer, lecturer and researcher who specialises in social science whose books have been translated into twenty different languages. His doctoral research involved looking at social and psychological myths constructed around the power of computers and his books, including, Paradigm Shift: How Expert Opinions Keep Changing on Life, the Universe, and Everything (2015) have explored key issues in philosophy of science including food myths and previous pandemic scares as well as the groupthink that enabled them.

“The end of everything we call life is at hand and cannot be evaded”
H. G. Wells (1946)

Thinking Errors and the Coronavirus

“The coronavirus doesn’t just make individual people ill – it threatens the whole of society too. Measures used to control the virus destroy people’s livelihoods, trample basic freedoms and, if prolonged, could eventually bring about wholesale societal collapse. . . .”

The asymptomatic spread is very significant in COVID-19

https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/coronacast/no-bare-bottoms-norman-swan-weighs-in/12154256

Coronacast is a daily podcast that’s all about answering your coronavirus questions.

SUBSCRIBE ON APPLE PODCASTS or LISTEN ON SPOTIFY

In today’s episode:

Are Australian governments trying to eliminate coronavirus, but just aren’t telling us yet?
When do you know if you’re sick enough to go to the hospital?
Can microwaves kill coronavirus?
Can you get coronavirus from farts?

And Dr Norman Swan discusses some research from Nature Medicine about when people are most infectious with the SARS-Cov-2 virus.

Duration: 11min

Broadcast: Fri 17 Apr 2020, 4:01am

Transcript

Norman Swan: Hello, this is Coronacast, a podcast all about the novel coronavirus. I’m physician and journalist Dr Norman Swan.

Tegan Taylor: And I’m health reporter Tegan Taylor, it’s Friday, 17 April.

The following I copied from the end of the transcript!

Tegan Taylor: So one of the things we do on most episodes of Coronacast is talk about a piece of research and that’s what we’re going to do today. And we’ve got one that you want to talk about, Norman, about when people are most infectious.

Norman Swan: Yes, this is a study which comes from China, looking at the shedding of virus. It’s fine to say that you’ve got the virus on board, but are you actually losing the virus into the atmosphere and spreading it to other people? And they did a study in China of about 77 pairs of people who…they knew the transmission path. Just under half of people spread the virus, they were shedding the virus prior to when they were symptomatic, in the pre-symptomatic stages. So it confirms what we know, and we’ve already had one question today acknowledging that, is that the asymptomatic spread is very significant in COVID-19. And so although this comes from earlier on in the epidemic, we are keeping on getting…in science the more reproducibility you get of results, the more confident that you can be. So we were saying maybe two or three weeks ago, four weeks ago it was 50% asymptomatic, that came from Korea I think initially. And now we know from a very specific study really looking at virus shedding that it is around the 40% to 50% range, which means that asymptomatic spread is significant and it’s why people are starting again to talk about masks so that asymptomatic people don’t spread it in public, and that we are careful with social distancing because you don’t know who you’re coming in contact with.

Tegan Taylor: One of the things I found really interesting about this study was it compared SARS-CoV-2 to the original SARS which…you were most infectious with SARS several days into having lots of symptoms, so that made it relatively easy to lock that virus down, whereas this is transmitting before people have symptoms, and so it’s really hard to get a handle on that when people haven’t even shown that they are sick yet.

Norman Swan: That’s right. I think it was day two or something like that with SARS-1, it was where you really began to be infectious and then continue from there. So even if you got somebody in the door and they said, look, I’ve just got symptoms from last night, you had some time here, and then you knew exactly…and that’s why healthcare workers were so much at risk because largely it was healthcare workers who came in contact with these people when they were symptomatic.

Asymptomatic here changes the nature of it, and this is why we are going to have to accept…even if we got to elimination and we started to lift controls, we are going to have to check everybody with a cough and a cold. And you say, well, why would you do that when 50% is asymptomatic? The only way to find asymptomatic people really systematically is find everybody with a cough and a cold, test them, and there’ll be a very small number who are COVID-19 positive, so do tens of thousands of tests for one or two positives. But for those one or two positives we find everybody they’ve come in contact with, whether we use one of these tracing apps or traditional contact tracing. And those contacts are potentially the people who will have asymptomatic spread because you know when they came in contact with them, you know what the average incubation period is and you can either test them or you can put them into strict quarantine and test them as you go along.

But that’s how you prevent asymptomatic spread, is find people with cases, find the people they’ve come in contact with. You always miss one or two people who are asymptomatic in the community, but you’ll get most of them. Isolate the person with COVID-19, strictly quarantine the people they come in contact with, testing, and then you’ll start to really get a handle on asymptomatic spread.

Tegan Taylor: Well, that’s all we’ve got time for in Coronacast today, but, as a reminder, Paul Kelly the Deputy Chief Medical Officer is coming to speak to us next week. Send us your questions for him by going to abc.net.au/coronavirus, and make sure you use the word Coronacast in your questions so that we can find it.

Norman Swan: And if you like the show, give us a rating and please review us at Apple Podcasts, we really like reading them and it helps others find us. Tell a friend about us too, you can find us at Apple Podcasts, you can find us on Spotify and Google Podcasts, as well as the ABC Listen app. We’ll see you on Monday.

Tegan Taylor: See you then.

When do you know if you’re sick enough to go to the hospital?

https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/coronacast/no-bare-bottoms-norman-swan-weighs-in/12154256

Tegan Taylor: We’ve got a question from Ian asking whether if you’re a young or middle-aged person, you’ve got mild symptoms, you’re positive for COVID-19 and you are in isolation at home but if your symptoms start getting worse (we were talking the other day about that second-week crash), what signs should people look out for as a sign that they need to go to hospital?

Norman Swan: If you get better, you start to feel okay, and then you get worse again, your cough gets worse, you’re feeling breathless, people look at you and say you’re looking really unwell, you’re a bit blotchy…I don’t know if people remember the video that Boris Johnson put out two or three days before he ended up in intensive care, he was at home, he looked terrible. So your blood oxygen levels are going to drop, so you’re going to look a bit blueish and blotchy and just not well. Hopefully you don’t get that far.

But I think that if that day 5 to 7, 8, you are feeling that you’re getting worse again, I think that’s when you check in with your GP and start to think about getting checked up. What they’ll probably do is a chest x-ray or a CT scan maybe, and also check your blood oxygen levels because blood oxygen levels tend to drop as well. Look, if at any time if you’re worried you should talk to your GP, but if you go through a period where it seems okay and then around about a week later you seem to be falling off the cliff, you don’t delay, you talk to your GP who will probably send you in to the emergency department.

Uta’s Diary from 2014/03/18 about Cataract Operations

On the 18th of March 2014, that is six years ago I published the following:

https://auntyuta.com/2014/03/18/utas-diary-3/

These pictures were taken by daughter Caroline this morning while we were waiting for Peter to come out of surgery. Caroline took the pictures with her phone. I had forgotten my camera. Still, I looked around taking some pictures in my mind. The tree I was touching in the above pictures looked marvellous. It was really smooth to the touch.

Peter’s cataract operation went well. After a couple of hours he was allowed to go home. It was good that Caroline could drive us. Peter has to wear his eye-patch till seven 0’clock tomorrow morning. The patch starts irritating him a lot. He keeps having the feeling that he wants to take it off. At the moment he has been lying down a bit trying to catch up on some sleep.

While we were waiting for Peter, we were able to spend a bit of time in the sun in the hospital grounds. It was a beautiful sunny morning. The older I get the more I love spending time in the sun. I have been reading lately a lot on the benefits of sunshine in connection with the need for Vitamin D. My favourite page on Vitamin D right now is this one:

http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-vitamin-d/how-do-i-get-the-vitamin-d-my-body-needs/

On the 24th of March 2014 Peter made the followig comment:

“The operation was on Tuesday. All went smoothly and I have no complain regarding the procedure. Next day when the dressing came off I thought I was in London experiencing the fog there. There was no vision in the eye. Luckily I have the other one. The doctor told me this sometimes happens when the patient has glaucoma (which I have). She gave me some tablets to bring the pressure down in the eye. Come back on Friday. Yesterday after two days of taking the tablets I started to see Daisy Duck. She is hanging on the wall in our toilet making sure people don’t misbehave. I call it now doing the “Daisy Test”. At first I could not see her at all we my brand new reconditioned eye. But yesterday afternoon she appeared, if ever so faint, out of the fog.

Last night I went to bed hoping for a further improvement. But in the morning it was all foggy again and Daisy wasn’t to been seen anywhere. Perhaps I used up my power of vision during my REM periods during sleep when I was able to see colourful flowers and bushes.

This morning it was back to my Ophthalmologist. She was happy with the progress I had made (did I ?) and she smiled with happiness as she reported, the pressure in my eye has gone done to “9”. Her smile and friendliness is so generous that I would forgive her losing my eyesight. But, she said, nothing to worry about, stop taking the tablets, increase one of the drops from one to six times a day and come back in five weeks – unless, of course, my eyesight has not improved by Tuesday then she wants me back next week. On questioning her she assured me, that the operation was a full success only my eye is a bit swollen and she is sure all will return to normal. Meantime I run to to the toilet more often and check whether Daisy Duck is appearing out of the fog.”

I wrote on 22nd of March 2014:

“Because of ‘macular hole’ I had an operation in Jan.2001. I had no vision in my left eye before the operation. Sadly the operation made no difference. Apart from having no clear vision in my left eye, I do have cataracts in it now as well. I was told I could have an operation for the cataracts. So far I declined. I was of the opinion since I cannot see with my left eye anyway, the removal of the cataracts would not make much difference. But I am not quite certain about this. Maybe my side vision could be improved with the operation? This is why I might reconsider.”

Now, six years later, I am doubtful whether I should agree to a cataract operation on my ‘good’ right eye. Of course my left eye is still totally blind. So the cataract on this blind eye does not worry me. But for some time now I have been told, that I should have a cataract operation on my ‘good’ right eye. However with glasses I can still see enough with my right eye! So I am very reluctant to undergo an operation. If this cataract on my right eye actually leads to blindness, I would of course like to have this operation, but I think for as long as I can still see enough, I am very reluctant to have an operation. I am told, there is very little risk that the operation may cause a problem to my eyesight. But even if there is only very little risk, I rather not have the operation, since I have no indication that my eyesight has in any way deteriorated during the last few years. I can still read and write and watch television. With glasses, of course. But isn’t that enough?

I wrote on the 24th of March 2014:

“To constantly have to remember so many different eyedrops to take at different times I would say is quite a struggle for Peter. He puts the bottles in a certain order. If he has forgotten one bottle he can see it for then it stands in line still. Once he has finished with the eyedrop, he puts the bottle in a different place . . . .”

Morning and night Peter is still being kept busy with all these eyedrops!

Black Forest Cake for Easter 2013

I cannot help myself, going through some more old posts, I just like to republish for instance this one from Easter 2013: This was seven years ago!

I wrote the following on Easter Monday 2013:

auntyuta Diary, Life in Australia, Old Age April 1, 2013

It was great to see the family over Easter. It’s Easter Monday today, another holiday. Today Peter and I are on our own again. We took some pictures yesterday with our lovely eight months old great-grandson Lucas and the whole family while they were at our place. We had Black Forest Cake. Baby Lucas had a taste of it too and liked it! He had his bottle, sitting upright and holding the bottle all by himself. He was keen to finish it right to the last drop!

Peter and I might go for a drive later on. For lunch we are going to have just left-overs from yesterday. We had yesterday a very colourful lunch. Unfortunately I didn’t take a picture of my lunch-plate. However it definitely looked very colourful. There was “Hackbraten” (Meatloaf!) with gravy and champignons, Brussels sprouts, red cabbage and boiled potatoes. Also a glass of beer with it. It’s such a simple meal but everyone liked it. We had Caroline and Matthew for lunch with us. Later on all the others arrived for afternoon coffee and cake and a little welcome drink. We were ten adults plus Baby Lucas. In about two weeks we are going to spend some time with our family in Melbourne.

Our drive to Melbourne in a rented car is going to be a great event for us. We don’t drive straight to Melbourne but have a few overnight stops on the way to see a bit of the country. We are very much looking forward to this.

Peter’s sister Ilse writes this is going to be an unforgettable Easter for them for there’s still snow all over Berlin. The asparagus farmers in the area fear the worst for their crops. It’s just too cold to grow anything. Large parts of Europe are still in the grip of winter. How much they long for warmer days and a bit of sunshine!

We had plenty of chocolate Easter eggs. I helped myself to quite a few and loved them!

A few days later I was able to publish some Easter photos from 2013:

Black Forest Cake

auntyuta Diary, Life in Australia, Old Age April 4, 2013

Finally I am able to show you our lovely Black Forest Cake that we had for Easter Sunday. Peter said this morning something about our router being quite old and the modem being even older. So he went today, bought a new modem/router, all in one, connected it and voila, now we can upload pictures again. What a relief!

So for good measure I include now some more pictures from Easter Sunday.

Little Lucas, our baby great-grandson, was allowed a taste of that delicious Black Forest Cake. He loved it and later on licked the spoon! He also loved to drink out of his bottle.

We all love little Lucas very much.

For breakfast I had hard boiled egg with a garnish of salmon.

Here are a few more of Easter Sunday’s pictures which I only just found in the files when I looked a bit more. There is a picture with Grandma Monika in the background holding little Lucas. In one of the other photos you see Ryan, the dad of Lucas. The brother of Ryan is at the table too but cannot be seen properly. Sorry, Troy, that I didn’t catch you properly.

RIMG0153