From apps to doctor's offices, we are being given more and more data and detail about our health. We are then given the drugs we need to balance each person's collection of conditions. This however argues David Healy is just the result of the neoliberal target setting pharmacology establishment pushing drugs to treat life. He argues for a rejection of this treatment in his continuation of Technology and the demise of medicine.

Targets created economic neo-liberalism. Targets emerged simultaneously in medicine and illustrate the ramifications of neoliberalism.

Treating diseases was the traditional goal of medicine. Up to 1980, doctors measured blood pressure, glucose and cholesterol levels, bone densities, and scores on rating scales as an aid to treating heart attacks, diabetes, or psychoses.

In 1981, blood pressure, glucose and related targets treating which would prevent heart attacks or psychoses. Services reorganized themselves to screen for and treat numbers. Before 1980, we brought our problems to doctors, after that medical clinics began to summon us for screening and gave us problems we didn’t know we had.  Rather than the market in health shrinking as prevention suggests, it expanded dramatically.

Pharmaceutical companies focused on treatments to manage these targets. Around 90% of company profits are made from medicines to treat targets rather from medicines to save people having heart attacks, strokes, or psychoses. Where once we might have taken a time-limited treatment for one disease, we were soon being treated in perpetuity with multiple drugs.

In contrast, the few new drugs that save lives, like Triple Therapy for AIDs or Solvadi for Hepatitis, bring immense pressure to lower the treatment price, leading to less profits than marketing medicines to the healthy, leading Goldman-Sachs recently to declare that saving lives is not a good business model.

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