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What we need is better measuring and quantifying of a patient’s situation. Right now they tell you “take these antibiotics for 10 days”. Instead they need a way

What we need is better measuring and quantifying of a patient’s situation. Right now they tell you “take these antibiotics for 10 days”. Instead they need a way to measure the infection and change the instruction to “take these antibiotics until this measurement is below 5”. This is a lot easier for patients to understand and follow vs a coarse “take this for 10 days” even though they feel better. It’s 2020 and we have a lot of tools to track users across the Internet but we don’t have anything besides blood tests to figure out our health. It definitely seems like an industry ripe for disruption.

bsder 6y ago
No. Patient compliance is already a problem. You need to decrease the complexity of a treatment, not increase it. For example, if you want Ursodiol for your gallstones, you will have to fight with your doctor. Why? You have to take it--daily, reliably, for more than a year before you will see any improvement. Yes, you may be an engineer with the self-discipline and knowledge to understand that you are basically ungrowing a crystal and that's a slow process, but the majority are not. They will miss treatments, they will double up treatments (useless, in this case), they will get tired of side effects, etc. > we don’t have anything besides blood tests to figure out our health. It definitely seems like an industry ripe for disruption. Spoken like an arrogant techie. A blood test doesn't magically indicate what is wrong with you, and there is a lot of noise in the signal where a blood test indicates something is wrong that really isn't.
- remote_phone 6y ago
  Your thinking is so primitive and biased towards failure. If you improve the tests and make things easier to understand, then it should be easier to get patient compliance. The unnecessarily opaque nature of medicine and tests are the problem. If we had a futuristic Apple Watch that gathered results somehow and then it told you when you take your medication, etc that’s a win for patients and medicine in general. Stop thinking about what we have right now and be imaginative. Naysayers are always wrong in the long run.

bsder 6y ago

No. Patient compliance is already a problem. You need to decrease the complexity of a treatment, not increase it. For example, if you want Ursodiol for your gallstones, you will have to fight with your doctor. Why? You have to take it--daily, reliably, for more than a year before you will see any improvement. Yes, you may be an engineer with the self-discipline and knowledge to understand that you are basically ungrowing a crystal and that's a slow process, but the majority are not. They will miss treatments, they will double up treatments (useless, in this case), they will get tired of side effects, etc. > we don’t have anything besides blood tests to figure out our health. It definitely seems like an industry ripe for disruption. Spoken like an arrogant techie. A blood test doesn't magically indicate what is wrong with you, and there is a lot of noise in the signal where a blood test indicates something is wrong that really isn't.

remote_phone 6y ago
Your thinking is so primitive and biased towards failure. If you improve the tests and make things easier to understand, then it should be easier to get patient compliance. The unnecessarily opaque nature of medicine and tests are the problem. If we had a futuristic Apple Watch that gathered results somehow and then it told you when you take your medication, etc that’s a win for patients and medicine in general. Stop thinking about what we have right now and be imaginative. Naysayers are always wrong in the long run.