Not knowing that you have a heart condition tends to be the most lethal about them. Once doctors know, they can fix a lot but not before. Usually the first doc

Not knowing that you have a heart condition tends to be the most lethal about them. Once doctors know, they can fix a lot but not before. Usually the first doctors do (beyond asking questions) is start measuring things. I've had a checkout a few years ago. That included the indignity of having to walk around with a thing that measured my blood pressure for a full day. It actually came in a bag that I had to carry around. All fine in the end. At least as fine as 24 hours of monitoring can confirm. But it drove the point home that those numbers were important to figure out if I had any issues. It also rubbed the notion in that by the numbers I was on a statistical path to a likely early death and that I had the opportunity to change things. I lost some weight by cutting down on junk food and I exercise a bit more. I'm not sure it's enough but I am undeniably in better shape these days. But it also made two things very obvious to me: 1) that stuff has got to be very obsolete. There has got to be a better way to measure people's vital signs than carrying around a thing that pumps itself up every minute or so just to measure heart pressure. And what about everything else? 2) Why don't we permanently monitor people's telemetry? I do that for servers I maintain. I set alerts when stuff is about to go bad. Why can't I monitor my body in the same way? More importantly, why is my body not monitored until it is too late? Why can't I give my doctor access to all that when I visit once a year for my checkup. Hell, why isn't he calling me when there's an obvious issue. The status quo is waiting for bad stuff to happen until you even get to see a doctor. Of course the raw numbers are not that useful unless you know how to read them but they are gold to the people that can. It's one thing to go to the doctor with some vague complaints; it's another thing to go to a doctor with a year's worth of data that make it very obvious what is going on.