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> You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as m

• sobiolite 4mo ago
  Aren't they serving the same thing? Proactively and reactively keeping you healthy requires understanding your body, both the baseline of how it functions when you're healthy, and how it functions when you're not. Right now we're often in a situation where the only data you have is expensive tests ran when you're sick enough to justify them, when it may already be too late.
  • jappgar 4mo ago
    Today only I'll sell you 6GB of data for 6000USD its a steal. Buy now.
  • deleted 4mo ago
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  • jermaustin1 4mo ago
    > Right now we're often in a situation where the only data you have is expensive tests ran when you're sick enough to justify them, when it may already be too late. In the USA, an annual physical includes a good deal of blood tests covered 100% by ACA-compliant insurance plans. The problem is most people don't do it. As a person with a few chronic conditions, I'm getting bloodwork done every few months at the cost to me of $5/mo (heavily discounted by my insurer's portion of the payment). What I have found is people who complain about the cost of the tests either don't have insurance (with many excuses for that: I'm too healthy, I can't afford it, doctors are for sick people, etc.) or don't go to the doctor, even though they pay a healthy percentage of their income for the privilege. Health Insurance is too expensive to not use it. Get every bit of free benefit out of your insurer as you can (gym memberships, annual physicals, drug/alcohol counselling, lots of screenings and vaccines, etc), and if they are going to charge you and/or your employer to the tune of $2000/mo, fucking use it!
    • wl 4mo ago
      Even those annual blood tests can be problematic. When I first started getting annual blood tests there were two values in particular that were consistently elevated. A bunch more tests and some specialist visits later the explanation was that I have a harmless genetic mutation that just causes those values to be high. A few years back I had some different values pop high. They implied scary things. More specialist visits than before. A lot more tests. After months of that all of the scary things were eventually ruled out. And then the values went back to normal. Nobody has an explanation even now. This is just with a pretty standard battery of tests: CBC with differential, comprehensive metabolic panel, lipid panel, TSH with reflex, vitamin D. They catch enough bad things that they're generally worth ordering on a regular basis for healthy people at annual physicals. The occasional wild goose chases like what happened with me is the price we pay for catching the more serious things. I guess we'll see just how valuable monthly whole body ultrasounds are. There's a real risk that it will catch a lot of benign things without catching enough serious things.
      • jermaustin1 4mo ago
        I have 2 autoimmune disorders/diseases, and I have spent the last 2 decades managing them. One of them (thyroid) is relatively easy, take my synthetic thyroid hormones ever day, and check my levels every 3 months to make sure I'm still good. The other is symptom management, which is less consistent, and a flair up from one causes the other to flair as well. And flairs are particularly hard to handle and function well. > I guess we'll see just how valuable monthly whole body ultrasounds are. There's a real risk that it will catch a lot of benign things without catching enough serious things. I'm all for blood tests, I'm 1000% against everyone getting ultrasounds regularly. I have done them a few times for specific cases, and every time they have found something that looked absolutely terrifying, that turned out to be benign. And the time between ultrasound and biopsy is weeks sometimes, which is even more terrifying while you sit there wondering if you are dying.
  • logravia 4mo ago
    False positives are the primary issue. False positives lead to stress, invasive diagnostic procedures and wasted medical resources. Look into the debate about what is the appropriate age for mammographies and how Apple Watches have resulted in overdiagnosis of heart conditions. For data to be useful we need rigorous medical science. We have shitton of worthless medical data with little science behind it.
• rvrs 4mo ago
  >A) proactively keeping me healthy, This will never happen and arguably should not be the *medical* system's problem. It is just not feasible
  • michaelscott 4mo ago
    This happens in a number of medical systems of countries across the world and is perfectly feasible, usually through premium subsidies for stuff like planned check ups, buying certain types of food and even installing equipment to monitor your driving behaviour. The thinking is that encouraging customers to be healthy reduces premium claims in the future
  • hombre_fatal 4mo ago
    To get a blood panel (cholesterol, liver enzymes, hemoglobin A1c, etc) I need to see my PCP who will order those tests from a testing facility. Else my insurance won’t cover it. And I have to schedule a whole visit and pay the copay for the privilege. Being able to get free tests every 6 months directly from the facility would be an example of a feasibly proactive measure the system could do for us. Maybe you’re only thinking of a system that will somehow get people to eat healthy and exercise?
  • AbsurdCensor 4mo ago
    I thought this was the main goal of things like preventative medicine. Earlier testing, and more frequent testing allows you to catch things while you still 'feel healthy' so they do not become a chronic problem in the long term. Simple things like tracking weight, blood pressure over time. Add in things like colonoscopies, breast exams, I would say most medicine should be preventative, ie keeping you healthy, rather than reactive, of just trying to try you when you are ill.
    • adjejmxbdjdn 4mo ago
      Unfortunately most doctors’ training simply doesn’t cover preventative medicine. Most medical schools teach doctors pretty much only to respond to medical situations. For example, a root cause of why there’s so much confusion among the general public when it comes to diet is that doctors receive very little nutrition training (maybe one course in their entire medical degree), so they know little about what the nutrition scientists are saying and have almost no knowledge of the primary literature and how to read and contextualize it. And yet most people will give far more credence to doctors for nutrition advice over actual nutrition scientists and researchers even though the latter have real knowledge about the science, whereas the former are largely basing their ideas on conventional wisdom, or lately pushing fad/extreme/industry paid for diet because they realized they can make money off of it. Things are improving, such as with heart disease doctors and their industry bodies because the link between diets high in say saturated fats and cardiovascular disease is so clear, they cannot ignore it, but the medical field has a long way to go still.
• jon-wood 4mo ago
  Yeah, I want something which is optimized for getting me actionable and more importantly accurate information, preferably without flagging every outlier as the harbinger of a disease that'll kill me within the next six weeks.
  • noduerme 4mo ago
    Okay, you're worried about too much data and false positives, but that's a problem you can get around by smoking a pack a day and not going to the doctor. The vast majority of people on the planet have exactly zero hard data on their ailments, and even if they spend their life savings trying to get a clear picture they may never have one. Could this much potentially frivolous data unlocked for semi-literate worriers and conspiracy theorists lead to whole subreddits full of people freaking out about questionably meaningful physiological aberrations? Definitely. But that's just a variation of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," and I believe we crossed that threshold as a society some time ago. So bring on the terabytes and let's see what we can do with them.
• mr_mitm 4mo ago
  After an injury, you may want to get an MRI to help you recover and determine best course of action. If an MRI cost a million dollars, or a single MRI scan took an entire day (which means every machine within driving distance will be booked years in advance or will be reserved for only the most critical cases), you won't benefit from an MRI image. "Megabytes per second per dollar" may not be the optimal way to phrase this, but cost and efficiency are a real concern.
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• santiagobasulto 4mo ago
  The fact that you're not naming any cost related variable reflects your own current personal situation (privileged, I'd assume). But this is NOT the situation for most people in the world. Don't get me wrong, I'm also privileged. I can pay for pretty much any type of medical intervention that I'd need. So my variables are usually "comfort", "speed", "convenience", etc. But I know that this is NOT the most common scenario for everybody.
  • monkeydust 4mo ago
    If you ask people to rank say 5 things from top to bottom where the first thing at the top is what they are least cost conscious about and the one at bottom is what they are most - I would bet health would at the top slot for most of us. So relatively we would spend (whatever we have) on our health versus other things if we had conviction on the outcome.
    • jordanb 4mo ago
      "I want to be able to walk without pain but if it's gonna be expensive forget it!"
  • estearum 4mo ago
    The best thing you can do for low cost is 1) eat better food and 2) move more "More data" is quite literally irrelevant.
    • jmye 4mo ago
      People don't do anything with the data they already have, to your point. Stand on a scale at the same time of day, every day. Track your intake. Track your output. See your PCP for your free AWV-equivalent, and keep an eye on your metrics. But no, we need GB of scanner outputs because some medically-illiterate (but still the smartest-guy-in-the-room) techbros want them for... reasons.
• aimanbenbaha 4mo ago
  Everything you want in your desired healthcare system can be stored as data.
• moduspol 4mo ago
  The way we figure out how to catch issues before you notice them (i.e. proactively keeping you healthy) and figure out the best ways to fix them (i.e. reactively helping you get back to healthy) is by having more data from more people in more situations, so we can make those determinations. I understand some of the current fatigue around biohacking and chasing perhaps-irrelevant metrics, but takes like this surprise me. Do you think people said the same kind of things before the blood pressure cuff became widely available? Or heart rate monitors? Or bathroom scales? Do we just want to walk around with blinders on because we think we feel OK right now? More data is the only way to get better at this stuff.
  • nlkkjhlkjsd 4mo ago
    I've been reading this website on and off for years now, and I remember one time I read that a silicon valley startup was selling a "smart cup" that would send you detailed statistics of how much water you drank (assuming you used your smart cup for every drink throughout the day). I suspect if I pitched this to doctors, they would say just drink when your thirsty; you don't need all that data. But that's not the point, right? The cup cost way more than your average cup. There's a certain type of person who will spare no expense on gadgets and supplements that promise "wellness," and it doesn't matter if it actually produces results or not. Ray Kurzweil supposedly takes dozens of vitamin pills a day, and I imagine the end result is expensive piss, but guys like that will pay anything for the fantasy that they could live forever. I'm not a doctor, so I can't say if this midjourney stuff has actual value. But considering they first plan to deliver this in a fancy spa, and that it's coming from a tech company, not pharma, my reflex is to question the medical value of this data. It just smells too much like one of those pricey, dubious wellness products, and a lot of us here are the ideal marks for such a scam.
    • zephyreon 4mo ago
      > But considering they first plan to deliver this in a fancy spa, and that it's coming from a tech company, not pharma, my reflex is to question the medical value of this data. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the entire pharma industry is not exactly known for their motivation to research and develop therapies for the betterment of humanity. Case in point, the opioid crisis, wherein pharma’s goal was to just sell as much of the drugs as possible without regard for the impact those drugs were having on the people taking them. I’m not saying this to defend tech — they’re guilty of the same things. I am saying this to suggest that if this play by Midjourney to reject VC funding and really lean into a community supported research lab works then you might end up with something closer to an altruistic approach than you would have otherwise.
• mawadev 4mo ago
  I want to give my money to actual individual doctors who studied this for a decade, have the work and life experience to make informed judgements and decisions to reason about my health. I dont want to pay a company to digitize my body and then sell the data back to me
• deleted 4mo ago
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• ineedasername 4mo ago
  How do you keep robustly pro active without data? Of course megabytes of data isn't a direct measure of health. That also isn't what medjourney is proposing be the metric. They didn't say "doctors will review the storage requirements of your available data and be able to tell you...". It's a straw man. Comprehensive imaging isn't a full insight into health. Neither are many questions in a medical history. But accurate and easy to obtain medical imaging is certainly a strong addition. Neither are complete, both are extremely useful and important. It's defense in depth. Included in an annual physical, imaging from even existing methods would have saved the lives of more than one family member who died of cancer gone undetected despite following existing best practices for preventative health. It's also impractical and expensive, though cheaper than years before. Faster cheaper and more accurate seem better still when it will be an additional channel of information.
• MadrasThorn 4mo ago
  > A) proactively keeping me healthy, and B) reactively helping get back to healthy when I am not You want technology to train you how to avoid environmental factors and then give you treatment? we're still very far away from eliminating humans in the loop from medicine.
• idontwantthis 4mo ago
  All I want is the safety that, if something is wrong, treating it won’t bankrupt me.
• cromka 4mo ago
  That's like saying you don't care about the hundreds of kilobytes of your DNA biome you can obtains nowadays for nearly free, you care about being healthy. My man, YOU USE THOSE bytes for that purpose exactly.