About Thomas Goetz
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I’m Thomas Goetz, author of The Decision Tree blog and of the new book, The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine (which you can order here). I’m also the executive editor of Wired Magazine.
You can email me here.
My Background: I’ve been a journalist for more than 15 years, first reporting on media and business at the Village Voice, then at the Wall Street Journal, followed by a crazed two years at the Industry Standard. I’ve been at Wired since 2001. As executive editor, my job is to help steer the ship and oversee all editorial efforts. Informally, you could say my job is to be a trend spotter or zeitgeist watcher, identifying the trends and ideas that matter to our readers, and to help formulate and package those ideas on the printed page. It’s a wonderful job, with a tremendously smart and fun staff.
I also write about science, health and medicine. In 2005 this led me back to school, and I picked up a Master of Public Health degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Public health is an incredibly broad field, covering everything from global health to community health to Medicare to pharmaceuticals. Generally, I use it as a tool to frame the contexts of health and medicine: how will medicine be deployed to X population and how might it improve health?
The opportunity that I write about here, and that informs the book, is that two trends have dovetailed at the present moment: From public health there’s the insight that engaging people in their health and involving them as decision-makers and participants tends to improve their behavior and their outcome. And from technology there’s the emergence of cheaper, better tools that can offer people a way in, through everything from self-tracking gadgets to online disease communities. In short, it’s a confluence of ideas and technology that make it an auspicious time for healthcare. That’s the premise of the book.
The Decision Tree idea: What’s a decision tree? Well, basically it’s a flow chart. So what does that have to do with health? The idea is this: Our health doesn’t happen all at once; it’s a consequence of years of choices – some large and some small – that combine to make up our health. Sometimes we’ve chosen wisely and we enjoy good health; sometimes we choose poorly and we suffer the consequences. A decision tree, then, is a trope; a device that can make these decisions more explicit and more obviously something we are actually choosing – it’s a way to externalize the choices that we otherwise make without much thought at all. Research shows that when we actually engage in a decision (when we think it through, even if just for a moment) we tend to make a better decision, defined both as one that we’re more comfortable with in hindsight and one that potentially bodes a better outcome. By engaging with our health consciously and explicitly as a series of decisions, one leading to another, we can become “smarter” and enjoy better health.
