Sometimes the person who solves a medical problem is not the person you would expect. Javid Akherat spends his days thinking in the language of math and physics, not medicine, and that is exactly what let him see something new. Dialysis patients often develop a dangerous narrowing in the veins used for treatment, and doctors had struggled to predict who it would happen to or when. Akherat wondered if the body itself was trying to adapt, reshaping the vein in response to the enormous flow of blood forced through it during treatment. So he built a model to test the idea, and it worked. His talk is a reminder that breakthroughs do not always come from inside the field with the problem. Sometimes they come from someone standing just outside of it, asking a different kind of question.
“Great contributions to research fields come from the people who are sometimes not from that field, because they see things from a different angle. They can think outside of the box.”
~ Javid Akherat
Breakthrough in Dialysis Treatment | Javid Akherat | TEDxIIT (YouTube)
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