3 ms·

I - as a man - would love to have an automatic full-blown blood test every month without going to the doctor

• DanBC 11y ago
  Why? You'd risk massive over-diagnosis and over-treatment, both of which provide a significant risk of serious harm.
  • pinko 11y ago
    This is a great point. I'm hugely attracted to the quantified self stuff, but the fact it's not clear the outcomes of knowing all this data is net good, given our flawed selves.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • rosser 11y ago
    I very much doubt users — let alone physicians — would be making treatment decisions on the basis of an automated testing regime. In the event of abnormalities on an automated test, you'd see your doctor, discuss, and order repeat and/or follow-up testing to confirm, refute, or clarify. Moreover, you'd also gain a very wide, data-rich baseline to compare subsequent results against, which would probably counter most of the over-diagnosis and allow for long-term trending of very important data. It would, IMO, be wholly worth the risks you raise.
    • icebraining 11y ago
      The problem is more subtle than simply doing a procedure based on faulty data - it's the invasive procedures done based on indication of a potential problem, often done to reduce risk without necessarily improving (and in fact, occasionally reducing) the health of the patient, simply because the patients discover they have some anomaly that may cause a real problem (like cancer) in the future, and they don't want to live in fear. http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/11/robert_aronowit.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/11/robert_aronowit.htm...
    • DanBC 11y ago
      Your answer to "people are going to be over diagnosed and over treated" is "but they'll talk to their doctor" - but that already happens in the US and the massive over testing, over diagnosis and over treatment already causes great harm, and it's the doctors who are doing it.
  • npunt 11y ago
    I appreciate the systemic concern around these things but every time I see this response I see it as todays thinking applied to tomorrows world. Right now, we have so few data points that we have little idea about the natural rhythms and variations of our body chemistry - just like how we have static imaging techniques but almost never any imaging of our bodies in motion. We have this really static view of all aspects of our bodies, coupled with 'normal' ranges that may not be our own normal. If we choose to do a bunch of tests on a perfectly healthy person, there's something bound to be outside normal. Applying todays thinking, that's a patient over-diagnosis problem as you say. However, if we're gathering frequent data from lots of people, we'll be able to approach diagnosis differently. We'll have a new, deeper understanding of the variance in our bodies, and its unlikely one area of bloodwork getting outside normal range is going to cause alarm - we'll be used to this (and normal ranges themselves will change). These data might result in health care providers recommending some minor preventative medicine course-correction, but if the data gathering is frequent enough, we'll have much better ability to understand when something is truly problematic that requires expensive & risky treatment. In that respect, frequent testing can lead to less expensive/risky over-treatment than today's world of infrequent sampling, and more cheap/minor nutritional/activity/etc interventions backed by data. I think the concern behind your statement is that the current system isn't going to be able to easily adapt to this new approach, and in the meantime there's going to be some over-diagnosis until the medical system can wrap its head around a new data-rich approach to things. The desire by patients to understand and optimize their health is going to be the driver here.