I recently watched this NBC clip on advancements in medical technology, which demonstrated the capacity that doctors now have to remotely monitor patients and the expanding role of continuous data collection in personalized medicine. The segment suggests that technology can be used to increase efficiency, decrease costs, and improve the doctor-patient relationship. But the segment also made me wonder how widespread use of this technology would impact our societal conception of health. Would our desire to improve our health turn us into lifelong patients, reliant on data for our decision-making? Would we develop a false sense of control, and blame ourselves for any negative outcomes? At what point does preventing disease impede peoples' ability to live happy, fulfilling lives -- the very goal of medicine in the first place? Personally, though I'd like a diabetic to know what foods cause their insulin to spike and how to appropriately manage their disease, I'm not convinced that continual monitoring would empower them to manage their disease with peace of mind. And I don't consider "healthy" to be synonymous with making decisions based on medical data, since data cannot include so many of the factors that are essential to health -- including doing what makes you feel fulfilled and happy.
The segment also mentioned personalized medicine as the best approach to patient care, and described the current approach as one in which people are viewed as cattle, assessed and treated the same way despite individual differences. Though I sympathize with this sentiment, and like viewing each individual as just that -- an individual -- the most strategic way of approaching medical treatment is by researching how it works on a population level and beginning patient treatments based on these results. To treat everyone uniquely would also mean treating them arbitrarily; there's no way of drawing conclusive results with a sample size of one.
