Slow-slow, quick-quick, slow. Health-care advances in Europe (Register Now: #EAPM Conference on Innovation & Guidelines)

In this modern world, with instant access to the internet for many of us, fast-moving technologies, data everywhere on just about anything, smartphones, smart watches, smart TVs and who knows what else, one could be excused for wondering why society still doesn’t actually, well, work properly, writes European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) Executive Director Denis Horgan.

Life should be perfect by now, surely? We should all be healthy, diseases should all be curable, cars should no longer rust, planes no longer fall out of the sky, icecaps no longer melt and industrial disasters no longer happen.

Well, it isn’t quite like that and that’s just ‘life’.

Clearly, many new developments bring with them their own problems (just take the fact that we cannot un-invent the nuclear bomb as one example), but surely every advance in medicine comes in at a 100% plus-point?

OK, apart from side-effects such as radiation in certain cases, over-treatment and more but generally speaking, the further science advances in the field of health then the longer we live and the relatively healthier we all should be.

This is even though increased longevity means that we may all suffer from more than one disease towards the end of our lives - the now ubiquitous ‘co-morbidities’ that many of the EU’s 500 million potential patients will eventually have to deal with.

Experts in the new era of health abound. The uptake of personalised medicine - giving the right treatment to the right patient at the right time - is slowly increasing, imaging is better than ever, as are cutting-edge IVDs, and we can now map a person’s entire DNA for a fraction of the cost that it was even ten years ago.

On top of this we even have wearables that can let our doctors keep an eye on our daily health issues without the need for time-consuming and costly surgery or hospital visits.

But the full potential of all this great new science has still not be realized. Progress is often painfully slow, even in areas that, theoretically, should be seeing full implementation across all 28 current EU member states.

So what’s going wrong? What’s causing the blockages? What is stopping many of the things that we know can be achieved from actually being put into practice?

Well, some argue that ‘the system’ is too restrictive to allow change. That can include ‘silo thinking’, a reluctance to cooperate across (and within) disciplines, an inability to coordinate (perhaps through failures in basic infrastructures within and across borders), and legislative barriers and laws that are outmoded and no longer fit for purpose.

Not only that, but there is often a lack of specialist knowledge or, indeed, a lack of interest in the political processes from the man or woman in the street. Most of us, understandably, are primarily concerned with ‘local’, self-interest based issues, such as putting food on the table, worrying about rent or mortgages, taxes and more taxes, that new car, our work/life balance, plus our personal and family relationships and so on.

We’re just too busy and disconnected to understand a lot of processes. Upton Sinclair, the author of ‘Metropolis’, once wrote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Sinclair may have had a point.

And because of this, we often avoid getting too close to even observing the messy business of running a country (or even a 28-state bloc). Otto von Bismarck is often quoted (whether correctly or not) as saying “to retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making”. He may also have had a point.

And, anyway, what difference can WE make? Let’s just leave it to the politicians at local, national or international level, and then moan about them all afterwards.

OK, most fundamental, societal change takes time. It always takes the majority mindset, as well as the political and practical machinery, a while to catch up with high-speed developments (such as in the health arena) and it’s probably not due to a lack of will.

But while our lives are getting longer, life, per se, is still relatively short. We’re all ageing unstoppably and moving one day closer to death each time the sun rises, despite the fact that we may have a little more time to hang around compared to those who lived 100 years ago.

One thing is for certain, here in Europe we’re already seeing political changes with, perhaps, a few more to come with the 2017 elections in the Netherlands, France and Germany. Outside mainland Europe, we have the UK’s former prime minister Tony Blair trying to get the House of Lords mobilized regarding Brexit and US President Trump leaving us scratching our heads over his planned relationships with the EU, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Israel and NATO, to name just a few. It’s immensely confusing and out of our control, for the most part.

It’s no surprise that the proverbial man on the Clapham omnibus has no idea where it’s all going to go, no matter how informed and up-to-speed he tries to be.

The same can be said for patients when it comes to health. Exciting, yet often baffling, new technologies are theoretically at our disposal but the theory seems to take an age to turn in to practice.

The question has to be asked, in a world where health has many times been proven to mean wealth, and the looking after of our citizens is a fundamental pillar of civilized society, as well as a bedrock on which the European Union is founded, why can we not move much faster to put all of our tremendous advances in health care to the best possible use before we all reach the age of 80?

This is the 21st century and there is no longer any excuse for hand-wringing and no longer any time for foot dragging. Europe needs to get its act together on health, and it needs to do so quickly.