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Are Smartphones Starting a Boom In DIY Medicine?
An anonymous reader writes "How are you using smartphones and other portable devices to take charge of your medical care? The NY Times has an article about attachments to the iPhone for tracking blood sugar and blood pressure. There are also glorified web cams that take pictures of your ear drum, teeth or eyes to save you a trip to the doctor's. Some people are tracking the changes in their moles with an iPhone App. Is this the beginning of Med 2.0?" Odd as it sounds, I was able to be more quickly and reliably diagnosed with Lyme disease last fall because I'd taken some pictures on my phone of the lesion I'd wrongly thought was the result of a spider bite. Any camera would have worked, but I had my camera-equipped phone with me, rather than any other kind.
As long as people don't like/trust doctors, or paying the high bills, there will always be serious interest in self-diagnosis. Smartphones do nothing to add to it, aside from allowing a portable search engine to plug symptoms into. Instant gratification.
On the plus side, this'll likely increase the amount of reported deaths caused by self-treatment, because "ZOMG Technology is EVOL!"
Consistency is only a virtue if you're not a screw-up.
I typed in my symptoms and my iPhone says that I have:
Internet Connectivity Problems
Oh no, do I have to go to the emergency room??!!!!?
I think that while documentation is already freely available for a lot of medical conditions, integrations into a single device (that you carry all the time with you) can surely raise awareness about such documentation. I don't think that people wanting to know more about a medical condition is necessarily evil or a sign of not trusting doctors. Has the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake completely disappeared? "Self-medication" may well result in misdiagnosis and possible complications by not going to the doctor in some cases, but on the flip side, it might encourage others to go consult trained professionnals because they think they might not have something as benign as they first thought. Furthermore, there is a lot of developement in completely automated tools for diagnosing infections, genetic mutations, etc which might reduce the need for some medical consultation within the next 5-10 years.
It's already here. You can find it under the name "Angry Birds."
"It is a fine line between lazy and efficient."
Just today was watching this Solve for X talk, where Kevin Dowling present strechable electronics, that is a very thin sheet can be attached to the skin and work as internal sensors, having communication and so on. Pairing that with a cellphone looks the next logical step.
And yes, with the appropiate sensors a cellphone could be a good boom for diy medicine, provided that it can detect whether you should worry about, take measures for yourself, or scale up to going to a proper doctor or hospital.
Using mobile technologies for healthcare is not just for self-diagnosis or as an alternative to expensive medical care. Many doctors and hospitals are adopting the technology and encouraging their patients to adopt it. There are lots of things you can do smaller and cheaper where telehealth systems or healthcare websites are currently being used. Preventive medicine mobile applications have been successful for improving health outcomes for patients with chronic conditions, in particular. Read the article before casually dismissing the field as a bunch of hypochondriacs trying to self-medicate.
If you're a developer interested in the mobile health field, the mHealth Summit is currently the best annual conference.focused specifically on mobile health out there: http://www.mhealthsummit.org/ Eric Topol, the subject of the NY Times article in the summary above, was one of the keynote speakers at the 2011 conference, along with HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.
Sad, but true...
And it gets even worse:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
"Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. If there was never another CABG or angioplasty performed or stent placed, patients with heart disease would be better off. Doctors would be forced to educate our citizens that their heart disease risk is determined by what they place on their forks. Millions of lives would be dramatically extended. To abandon the theory of stretching and cutting out areas with plaque would shut down interventional cardiology, nearly all cardiovascular surgery, and many suppliers of the biotechnology. In many cases, interventional cardiology is the major income generator to hospitals. The ending of this ill-conceived, out-dated and ineffective technology would dramatically downsize hospitals in the United States and free up over $100 billion annually in medical care costs. Besides being ineffective, interventional cardiology places the responsibility in the hands of the doctor and not the patients. When patients finally realize they must take control of their heart problems with aggressive dietary modifications (and when needed medications for temporary periods) we will essentially solve the health crisis in America.
The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions.
Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart disease to begin with, and if they get it, aggressive nutrition is the most life-saving intervention. And it is free."
And:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. (Marcia Angell)"
Much of the path to better health was known 100 years ago by the natural hygienists. See:
http://soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/shelton.bio.bidwell.htm
"At this time in 1927, Dr. Shelton is already being harassed in his Hygienic practice by advocates of The Medical Mentality and by the police. In 1927, Dr. Shelton is jailed for the first time for "practicing medicine without a license" and is fined $100.oo. This same year of 1927, a second arrest takes place, under similar circumstances and with charges of $300.oo. His money is so tight this second time, he has to borrow to be released. Also,
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.