Foreword
Back in the spring of 2006, I was getting headaches consistently around lunchtime every Saturday. It was really weird. At first I didn’t recognize the pattern, I just knew that my head hurt a lot, and I tried to make it go away by popping ibuprofen. The pills kind of worked, but not really. After way too long, I finally realized what must be going on.
One of the classic things everybody knows about Microsoft is that they give employees free soda. It’s a pretty cool perk, but for those of us with no moderation switch, it can get a bit out of hand. When I came back to Microsoft in 2006 to start the HealthVault team, I quickly ran up a Diet Coke habit in the range of sixteen each day. All week—until Saturday, because the fridge in my house doesn’t magically regenerate Diet Coke.
Suddenly it was just blindingly obvious: I was suffering from caffeine withdrawal. Now, a better man than I would have recognized that all that soda probably wasn’t a good idea anyway. But instead, I just switched to caffeine-free Diet Coke and the headaches disappeared. I still spend a lot of time running to the restroom, but that’s another issue altogether!
I love this story because it’s so simple and obvious—and yet it offers up a clear path to making improvements in all aspects of clinical care:
We have to measure our bodies over time and space.
We have to correlate the data we measure to identify patterns.
Doctors measure a lot of stuff to ...
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