Why doctors should treat the healthy too

When you're not sick, doctors often have no idea about your health. Biologist Leroy Hood believes that needs to change.

Prevention is better than cure – but if we don’t recognise the early signs that we are ill, how can we take the steps to avoid full-blown disease? Leroy Hood, head of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington, thinks the answer is for medicine to transform so that doctors are tracking the healthy in much greater detail.

Last year his team provided a vision of the future through a pilot project that tracked 107 healthy people for nine months. The researchers analysed blood, urine, saliva and faecal samples that each person provided every few months, and pored over data from wearable gadgets that tracked the volunteers’ physical activity levels and sleep patterns. Some of the volunteers showed the subtle early signs of health problems, like diabetes, that could then be moderated through lifestyle changes. In other words, by treating the healthy we really can prevent disease instead of curing it after it develops.

Hood now hopes to repeat the process on a much larger scale, tracking 100,000 people. As he explains in the video above, ultimately he thinks this sort of approach will lead to a new ‘wellness’ industry that complements our current ‘sickness’ industry – and he says the equivalent of Google and Microsoft within the ‘wellness’ industry might begin to emerge in the next 12 months.

Hood spoke to BBC Future at the Astellas Innovation Debate at the Royal Institution in London. Images: SPL