I want to raise the following issue. There is an ever-growing number of ways for people to gather data about their bodies which used to be the exclusive domain of the medical profession. Some of the major ones I can think of include direct-to-consumer blood testing, sleep monitoring, genetic testing, neurofeedback, etc.
This raises the following ethical question: do the benefits of this trend outweigh the risks? The risks are well-known but are worth restating:
False conviction by a person that a particular system of their body is in good health based on a DIY test which may not be accurate, reliable, should not be read in isolation, would not normally be recommended by a health professional and is not subject to assessment by a health professional, etc.
Unnecessary anxiety suffered by a person that a particular system of their body is not in good health based on a DIY test with all the limitations listed above.
Do the benefits of selling burgers outweigh the risks? What about selling alcohol? I’m sure these two alone cause a lot more suffering than direct-to-consumer testing services ever will That said, it’s in the best interest of consumers as well as companies to have services that overstate the power of their tests (i.e. false advertising) penalized or shut down.
As it relates to health, I don’t view QS as a replacement for my doctor, but rather as a complement. The problem is, traditional medicine is about treating symptoms; functional medicine is about getting to the root cause of problems. And in order to identify causes you need data, whether that be via lab tests or data you have proactively tracked yourself (and usually some combination of both). For that reason, I work closely with a functional medicine doctor.
I’m not convinced that risk can be reasonably assessed at the scale of a “trend” like this. It is very difficult to create a “global” list of benefits and harms in a plausible way. However, at the scale of single person, that question is more tractable. I’m less afraid of getting these tests on my own than I am of having them prescribed for me by a doctor, because the role of the doctor as a retail outlet for assessments and treatments, including referrals to specialists and facilities with whom the doctor has financial ties, creates incentives to interpret results in a way that leads to excessive treatment. In my own case, I’ve noticed that I bring more caution, rather than less, to the interpretation of test results that I access directly. Since medical treatment entails risks that doctors often fail to acknowledge, I think the benefits outweigh the risks in my case.
How are you so sure? Anyway, alcohol is an interesting comparison, because even though alcoholics are a minority of drinkers, they drink so much more that they’re a majority of sales. So you could argue that the industry’s financial incentives are seriously misaligned with those of society. I think gambling has a similar dynamic. Maybe not fast food but who knows.
At an individual level I wholly agree with Gary’s points, but not everyone is that sensible, and even if most people are, I wonder if the hypochondriacs will still outspend us to the extent that the companies are effectively incented to encourage hypochondria…
[quote]1. False conviction by a person that a particular system of their body is in good health based on a DIY test which may not be accurate, reliable, should not be read in isolation, would not normally be recommended by a health professional and is not subject to assessment by a health professional, etc.[/quote]This sounds like it’s written by a person who doesn’t know what they are talking about.
Gathering a lot of empirical feedback general puts you into a positions that you have a lot of data and it’s not clear what’s going on. Data doesn’t make you believe that you know how things work. It shows you how little you know.
[quote]should not be read in isolation[/quote]QS is not about having a single value in isolation.
If I measure my blood pressure daily I have a lot of data. If I go to a doctor and the doctor measures my blood pressure once, that’s an value in isolation. Blood pressure changes a lot from moment to moment and the doctor has no way of knowing whether the blood pressure he measures is a typical value for me.
[quote]2. Unnecessary anxiety suffered by a person that a particular system of their body is not in good health based on a DIY test with all the limitations listed above.[/quote]We live in a world where the average doctor doesn’t know enough statistics to solve Bayes theorem to give his patients the correct risks given the sensitivity and specificity that a test documents. Additional the doctor has financial incentives to sell additional medical treatment that such as surgeries that can be very harmful.
Recently we moved up the age where we do routine cancer tests because the tests produced false positives and those false positives lead to unnecessary operations.
That said, it’s in the best interest of consumers as well as companies to have services that overstate the power of their tests (i.e. false advertising) penalized or shut down.