Slashdot Mirror
Body 2.0 — Continuous Monitoring of the Human Body
Singularity Hub has a story about the development of technology that will some day allow for the constant, real-time monitoring of your medical status, and they take a look at current technological advances to that end. Quoting:
"Did you ever stop to think how silly and also how dangerous it is to live our lives with absolutely no monitoring of our body's medical status? Years from now people will look back and find it unbelievable that heart attacks, strokes, hormone imbalances, sugar levels, and hundreds of other bodily vital signs and malfunctions were not being continuously anticipated and monitored by medical implants. ... The huge amounts of data that would be accumulated from hundreds of thousands of continuously monitored people would be nothing short of a revolution for medical research and analysis. This data could be harvested to understand the minute by minute changes in body chemistry that occur in response to medication, stress, infection, and so on. As an example, the daily fluctuations in hormone levels of hundreds of thousands of individuals could be tracked and charted 24/7 to determine a baseline from which abnormalities and patterns could be extracted. The possibilities are enormous."
... where you're not going to die from a lot of causes that were common just ten years ago. The most common cause of death is now complications from implanting several pounds of electronics in your body, and while that's unfortunately enough to keep the mortality rate at just the same level, it's usually less painful.
I actually used to monitor these things myself, and I found it led to a higher level of stress and even drove me to panic attacks. Monitoring anything extensively is obsession, and an obsession can make you neglect other things, such as mental health.
When the government gives you taxpayer-supported healthcare, the government also has the right to run your life
Not true. I live in a country with publicly funded healthcare. It seems statements such as yours are FUD and rhetoric from the private healthcare industry since it clearly not how things actually work out. Clearly totally private healthcare as implemented in the USA does not work. The advantage of of public healthcare is everybody has access to it, and are get care based on need, not on wealth class or race, which is what inevitably happens with an private insurance based system.
So presumably, you trust big corporates more than a government?
Don't get me wrong though, public healtcare has problems, especially in terms of limited resources in the UK, various EU members, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, etc. But somehow these nations rank much higher in health standards that the USA.
For-profit health care is beholden to a financial bottom line, not a democratic government mandated to measure performance on care, not revenue. So in private vs public the latter is the lesser of two evils.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
DUI (driving with more than 0.08) is only for motor driving (car, boat, snowmobile, tractor, plane).
But you still can get a ticket for riding a horse while drunk, though the consequences are a lot less important. A 100$ ticket.
http://lejournaldequebec.canoe.ca/journaldequebec/actualites/quebec/archives/2009/01/20090123-120605.html/ Two months ago in Trois-RiviÃres.
The answer IS 42.
Because random tests are flawed. How many times do we need to hear about missed heart conditions or even missed diabetes because an annual random test is not effective as constant real time monitoring for an extended period?
The only reason we have the "annual checkup" system is not because its effective but because its cheap.