The one piece of advice I can give is... Don’t ever give up.
Along the path of your journey, people may -
Steal your concept
Use up all your resources then dump you
Lend you money that you can’t possibly afford to repay, forcing you into early debt and
bad decisions.
Everyone I know in the entrepreneurship business has been some of the above situations.
This is not an easy road to travel.
From the early days of hunting woolly mammoths, entrepreneurs have been the ‘fix it’
person in their clan.
We see the grief that problems cause in people’s lives, and do our best to resolve them.
From transporting dead animals back to caves, to preserving food during winter, centuries
of unknown entrepreneurs have left their mark on society.
Entrepreneurs are like engineers. We know that the solution lies inside each problem, like
a pearl inside an oyster. Any key can be reversed engineered. All you need is the lock to
work with.
We are not easy-going people.
But we are tenacious enough to survive the difficult journey of bringing about the small
but essential improvement that make life safer and richer.
So don’t give up. Someone somewhere needs your inventions.
Who am I?
A Viking type. Strong. Able to survive great tragedy. And chasing a modern day woolly
mammoth.
What is the problem am I trying to solve?
Preventable medical errors.
My mother was told in her forties that breast cancer was a ‘curable disease’.
Radiotherapy damaged her heart, and she nearly died. After surgery to release the
pressure from the damaged pericardial layer around her heart, she went home with
hepatitis C from a tainted blood transfusion.
In her final years she was dependent on steroids to control the inflammation around her
heart.
Her once handsome face was bloated, Doctors called it ‘prednisone moon face’. She hid,
ashamed of her appearance.
Off steroids she lost stones, but became so short of breath she could hardly walk down the
street.
On steroids she required a seperate wardrobe full of baggy clothes.
At the age of 63 she rang me. ‘The cancer’s back. It’s in my lungs’. She sobbed.
The next day I jumped on a bus, plane and train from Geelong, Victoria to the Blue
Mountains, NSW.
Three weeks later she was dead.
My mother had five causes of death listed on her death certificate. Three were caused by
her ‘successful’ cancer treatment.
Pericarditis
Dressler’s symptom
Hepatitis C
Lung cancer
Breast cancer
You won’t find my mothers case recorded in any medical statistics. A death post five years
of initial cancer diagnosis is officially recorded as a ‘cure’.
Stories of medical error only appear in obscure academic articles.
Lawyers processing medical negligence claims demand non-disclosure agreements,
depriving the public of essential knowledge about what goes wrong, why and how often.
Most health technology never gets subsidised up by government or private insurers,
despite being safer and more accurate.
Which is why I created a site that sorts international health technology into medical
specialties and matches them against the problems they solve.
It’s called Wikihospitals.
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