why medicine’s future needs wired patients

If you think we’re in data overload now, just wait until the numbers of so-called wired patients swells. A profile of one such patient appears in MIT Technology Review, and foretells of a future in which patients track over a few thousand biomarkers to identify the onset of chronic diseases, have their genomes scanned in, out, back and forward again, then sideways and inside out, and everything about them is being constantly tested. Now, from the side it would certainly seem like this constant prodding and measuring would seem like hell and the patients who’ll want to sign up for something like this will be hypochondriacs.

But would that really be case? If you want to be a wired, hyper-analyzed patient today, you have to be extremely proactive, have roughly $50,000 or more per year to cover the costs of testing, and supervise the tests yourself. In the future, things could work quite differently and various nano sensors working their way around your bloodstream until being flushed out by the body to make room for another wave, would silently collect your vitals and only alert you if where’s a real emergency or if something’s really off. This sort of passive scanning wouldn’t require dedication to a battery of tests and instead, give the patients peace of mind. If something’s actually wrong, they’ll know it quickly.

Usually the faster you catch an illness, the faster it can be treated and the greater your chances of beating the disease, especially when it comes to potentially terminal but difficult to detect conditions like certain cancers. Having a little nanobot army patrolling your body for disease and keeping track of how things are working has the potential to detect these dangerous conditions before they start doing real harm and guide doctors’ future smart medications to newly arisen tumors for biopsies and treatment. Keeping track of such things as weight and cholesterol could allow the patients to take better care of themselves too, knowing when they can afford a caloric splurge and when they better moderate their diet habits for the sake of their hearts and waistlines.

The hoped for result? Patients living longer, healthier, fuller lives, doctors who know what’s going on with patients so they can make more accurate diagnoses and recommend more effective treatments, and yes, savings for health insurance companies and their customers by reducing the number of claims generated by conditions that have become chronic and require constant medical care and supervision. Of course the testing would be an ongoing expense but it would be a lot cheaper to cover ongoing personal tests than decades of claims for those suffering from diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and other chronic maladies.

Hold on a second though, doctors would say, over-testing is not a panacea. How much good will we do many patients by keeping them anxious and doing test after test on them? After all, when you really set out to find an anomaly in the human body, biology won’t disappoint. How much time and money should a patient invest in a potentially dead end, examining and reexamining something harmless? All of this is certainly true, but doctor- driven objections to wired patients aren’t so much objections to the testing itself as much as they are a strong argument for guided measurements by automatic systems certified to keep track of a patient’s vitals without a constant necessity to perform test after test after test at a doctor’s office, silently analyzing biomarkers unless very real concerns emerge.

You don’t think of your firewall and antivirus every time you use your computer and unless there’s a virus actively trying to infect your computer or some piece of malware trying to broadcast what its found on your hard drive through the web, you wouldn’t want it in the way. But would you really want to turn it off completely with the idea that the more you scan your computer and find cryptically named files, processes, and filders you can’t readily identify, the more paranoid you’ll become that your machine has been infected so you’ll spend a lot of money buying more and more tools to scan and re-scan harmless data?

Again, the goal here is balance and automation. Those utterly paranoid about their health will always exist, as will those who’ll misinterpret an elevated or low, but still perfectly safe, level of whatever in their blood or stool or urine. Nothing can be done about them. But the vast majority of people who should be wired with a swarm of medical nanobots in the future would be more than content with simply knowing that should any dangerous disease or condition start rearing its ugly head, they’ll be alerted and sent to the doctor promptly, with a much higher chance of being effectively treated and cured. Who wouldn’t want to be told when his or her behavior is trending into health-endangering territory?

Obviously we can’t make acting on the information compulsory but we have to at least inform the patients, and sometimes, just a little information would make all the difference and just a few tests carried out in time can save someone. If technologies on the horizon will let us to improve and save millions of lives, why dismiss them as burdensome and excessive just because there will be some hypochondriacs who’ll will get carried away with them in their search for an illness they’re sure plagues them, as if they don’t get carried away with anything today? If we want to improve medical care and lower the cost of healthcare, we need to enable wired patients and get systems that will help them stay healthy to market.