How Do We Heal Medicine?

In my quest to reduce wasted television hours and increase beneficial viewing/education hours, I've turned to TED, the nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading.  TED started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences -- the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh UK each summer -- TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and TED Conversations, the inspiring TEaD Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize. (That text was taken from the About TED page, by the way.)

Anyway, my breakfast TED this morning ended up being "How do we heal medicine" by Atul Gawande which is an excellent way to spend just under 20 minutes of your life.  There are a number of lessons in this presentation, but the biggest lesson I found was this:

In every field knowledge has exploded.  It has brought complexity, it has brought specialization and we have come to a place where we have no choice but to recognize as individualistic as we want to be, complexity requires group success.

This clearly isn't a message just for medicos, it is a message for any industry, especially for the ICT (Information and Communications Technology) industry.  Everything has become so specialized that the "sole trader" is pretty much left high and dry unless they are willing to work *with* other people in an organized fashion.

Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie