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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.
It also leads to rampant, self-diagnosing webochondria. I will admit, I am an offender in this respect.
I'm not saying the data shouldn't be available, just that most people won't be able to use it properly.
I'm hoping for the Uberization of health care. There is no excuse for keeping medical information from the patient himself under the guise of "privacy," especially when governments get free and full access to the same data. Yes, a lot of people are faddish about health, but this is just as big a problem under today's locked-down system, and I resent having my right to self-discovery and choice of treatment limited because a minority of the gullible are following quack ideologies. In fact, believers in "supplements" and other nostra enjoy protected status under current law, while patients are rigidly prevented from getting open-market access to real medicine.
What our medical system really fears is not Obamacare, but the free market. To hospitals, doctors and pharma companies, socialism is just another set of rules they can game to keep their prices two orders of magnitude above the market.
Wait until people start figuring out just how much "better-informed" the doctors and medical researchers are. It may first require dropping of the journal paywalls as well, but it is only a matter of time before first engineers and physicists from other fields take a close look at what has been passing for scientific method. Then there will be the authoritative voice to get others to take a closer look, etc. It will be epic when it finally happens.
Oh, everybody knows this. Medical research is a poor, psychotic cousin to 'real' science. It's going to be that way for quite some time. 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.
On top of the rather, ah, interesting history of how medicine became forefront in Western society (it makes Alice in Wonderland seem perfectly sane), human hubris, the medical - industrial complex and the plain old fact that biology is hard and you have modern medicine scrabbling for acorns under the tree, finding them occasionally but mostly eating rocks and twigs.
There won't be any 'authoritative' voices telling us how to do things because we know what we need to do. Be very, very patient. Invest lots more in basic research at all levels and continue to be patient. We're much more likely to fully fund NASA than that.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
All knowledge of any kind, leads certain types of people to believe they know more than they do.
"I watched every episode of LA Law, and I'm telling you, they are going to have to acquit that guy. Fruit of the poison tree! Fruit of the poison tree!"
"I've watched lots of porn so I know how to please a woman."
"I installed Wordpress, and now I know how to store things in a database. You just update_post_meta()! OMG, you're still using fields?! Loser."