Big Picture Medicine Mustafa Sultan

So it's your first day as Health Secretary — what do you do!?

Richard Sloggett was former Special Advisor to the Health Secretary (Matt Hancock) during which he worked across public health, the NHS and social care. He’s also Senior Fellow at the think tank Policy Exchange and has been named one of the 100 most influential people in healthcare policy by the Health Service Journal.

Richard has also recently founded a global healthcare policy research centre: Future Health. The Centre is researching health and economic opportunities in building more resilient and preventative healthcare systems enabled by new technologies: https://www.futurehealth-research.com

We talk about whether healthcare is as unique as medics like to think, Richard’s learnings from his time as special advisor and his specific recommendations for getting clued up on health policy.

I hope you enjoy.

You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

How can we use models to diagnose patients with rare diseases earlier?

Rudy Benfredj is Co-founder and CEO of Mendelian; who are helping doctors find and diagnose rare disease patients earlier.

Rare diseases are individually rare, but collectively quite common — they affect 1 in 17 people. With 8000+ rare diseases and some only affecting a handful of people across the globe — rare diseases take an average of 7 years to diagnose — which is dubbed the diagnostic odyssey.

Rudy is super interesting and I pick his brain about how artificial intelligence can be used help reduce the diagnostic odyssey in rare diseases. I hope you enjoy.

You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

Professor Karl Friston is the most frequently cited neuroscientist in the world. Some of his most fascinating ideas centre around brain imaging, and of course, his infamous free energy principle — a grand unifying principle for cognitive science and biology.

Professor Friston is incredibly insightful and patient with my questions — which at times feel like a 5 year old playing with a grand chess master. We speak about consciousness, brain computer interfaces as well as Professor Friston’s story and advice for young academics. I try to deconstruct some of what his enabled him to put forward so many novel, impactful ideas.

I hope you enjoy.

I recommend listening to Lex Fridman’s interview of Professor Friston. Lex asks much more intelligent questions: https://lexfridman.com/karl-friston/

Secondly there’s a wonderful Wired article written by Shaun Raviv which you won’t be able to put down: https://www.wired.com/story/karl-friston-free-energy-principle-artificial-intelligence/

You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

What can you learn from studying the brains of London cabbies?

Hugo Spiers is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL. He studies how we remember, navigate and imagine space.

Some of his most interesting work has examined the brains of London cabbies who are required to learn the roads of London in painstaking detail. Now he leads the SeaHeroQuest project, in which his team are studying dementia using a mobile game.

We talk about his research — which in my opinion is fascinating but I delve a bit deeper — asking how ordinary people can themselves do fascinating research and not get stuck on mind numbingly boring projects. We speak about how he manages his time, how he sees work, mentorship and how he communicates and publicises his research so effectively.

I hope you enjoy.

Professor Spier's fiction book recommendation: Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe.

You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

Do you need to be a d**k to be a good leader? Here's what Dr Nadine said...

Dr Nadine Hachach-Haram BEM is a plastic surgeon and CEO of Proximie — an augmented reality platform for virtual surgical collaboration. Rather than telemedicine it’s about telepresence. It means that a surgeon in the UK could open up their web browser, and see what another surgeon across the world is doing in real time and collaborate.

Proximie has had incredible impact: it’s helped people in need across the world access surgical care, it’s been used by NHS surgeons who are self-isolating due to coronavirus and it’s also being used by the RAF.

Dr Nadine received the British Empire Medal in the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours for her innovation in surgery.

You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

Do you need to be a d**k to be a good leader? Here's what Dr Eric Topol said...

Dr Eric Topol is in the top 10 most cited doctors in the history of Medicine. He is a cardiologist, geneticist and digital medicine expert — and was commissioned by the UK’s Health Secretary to write a report to prepare the NHS for the digital future: The Topol Review.

Dr Topol has three best selling books on the future of Medicine: the Creative Destruction of Medicine, The Patient Will See you Now and Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again. 

You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io