The Democratization of Medical Diagnosis and Discovery

An anonymous reader writes: As wearable fitness devices become popular, we're seeing the beginning of a change in how untrained people can monitor their own health. On top of that, we also have access now to powerful data-sharing tools — if a patient has the means and the interest to look at the data from a doctor's medical scans, she can. A post at the NY Times argues this is leading to the democratization of medical discovery. Physicians and researchers are now saying, "Better-informed patients ... are more likely to take better care of themselves, comply with prescription drug regimens and even detect early-warning signals of illness." These tools also allow easier aggregation of data from large groups of patients (hopefully anonymized), which can provide more accurate assessments of the typical course of disease than current methods, which often rely on interpretations of interpretations.

Comments

Re:Probably a bad thing.

[rock_climbing_guy]

Hard to grow a bunch of humans with a gene deletion, wait until they're old, euthanize them and then slice them up for analysis. Even if you did that with lawyers and politicians, you'd have to wait an awful long time to get any results.

I must say, if you did that with enough lawyers and politicians, it might make research easier for generations to come!