Doctor in Your Pocket and On Your Screen

Written by Lee Schneider

photo credit: j.reed via Flickr Creative Commons

You’re out for a walk one day. Your phone buzzes. It’s an automatically generated text: “Go home and take your blood pressure medication.” Just wait until you have a doctor in your pocket or one on your screen.

According to a recent article in GIGAOM, researchers are working on making your smart phone really smart. Like save-your-life smart. UCLA scientists have a phone prototype that can monitor HIV and malaria and test water quality. The phone can light up a sample of blood, saliva or water and capture an image to help a doctor analyze the bad stuff in the sample. Epidemiologists in remote places could use their phones to monitor the spread of disease and alert public health authorities to direct resources where they’re needed.

Then there’s Aydogan Ozcan, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at UCLA. He’s created an attachment for a cell phone that transforms it into a microscope. Ready for a diagnosis on the road? “We convert cellphones into devices that diagnose diseases,” he explains, quoted in the New York Times. He’s formed a company called Microskia to bring the technology to market.

“This is an inexpensive way to eliminate a microscope and sample biological images with a basic cellphone camera instead,” Dr. Ozcan says. “If you are in a place where getting to a microscope or medical facility is not straightforward, this is a really smart solution.”

People are also getting medical advice from their computer screens. Google Insights for Search tells me that searches for “webmd.com” are up 800 percent. Of course, if WebMD.com recommends brain surgery I might seek out the opinion of a real doctor.

(“Look honey, here’s a YouTube video showing how to do that surgery yourself – you could save a bundle.”)

WebMD.com and Drweil.com can be useful, but they are one-way and not personal. That will change with on-line health management systems like DPS Health. (Disclosure: The founder of DPS Health is a friend of mine.) DPS Health is an on-line system allowing health care providers to interact with their patients remotely, but personally. Patients can track their patterns of exercise and diet choices. Their health care professional can monitor what’s happening and make recommendations. A site called Get Fit Get Right, run by the Starlight Children’s Foundation, is using this interactive feature provided by DPS Health – they’re calling it COACH. Kids can use it to get inspired about exercise and get feedback for their success.

There’s even a Microsoft-driven movement to get all your medical records on-line for easy access. It hasn’t really caught on yet because of privacy concerns. But the logic seems solid. On-line access to medical records streamlines care. More engagement with a health care coach might make you healthier. And everybody has their phone with them nearly all the time. Instead of checking on your messages, your phone could be checking on you.

It Works Because You Say So

My doctor gave me six months to live. But when I couldn’t pay the bill he gave me six months more.
-Walter Matthau, actor

You go to a doctor. The doctor gives you a pill. You get better. Then you find out the doctor gave you a sugar pill and you got better anyway.

You might have gotten better without bothering to go to the doctor at all. Or it could be the Placebo Effect. This has some folks in the UK pretty ticked off.

On January 30, a group called 10:23 is protesting an English drug store chain’s decision to sell homeopathic remedies. Boing Boing carried the story that 300 unbelievers across the UK are each planning to swallow an entire bottle of homeopathic pills. It’s a mass “overdose” intended to show that the homeopathic remedies are nothing but sugar pills and fake medicine. The event should be interesting, particularly if any of the protesters go into a sugar-induced coma.

Homeopathy is based on three central ideas: First, the Law of Similars: whatever causes your symptoms can also cure them. If you can’t sleep, try caffeine. Second, the Law of Infinitesimals. When you dilute a cure in water, it gets stronger. Third, the Law of Succussion, which states that each time you dilute your cure in water you are to tap the bottle to “potentize” it. Homeopaths believe this allows the water to retain the memory or vibration of the cure.

If you believe in homeopathy, this information is unbearably exciting. If you don’t, it sounds like superstitious nonsense and “magik” from 1796, which is when homeopathy was invented by one Samuel Hahnemann.

What if it’s not about what’s in the pills at all? What if their potency is predicated upon the intent of the user, the mystique surrounding the pills, or the package they came in? In 1955, an anesthesiologist named Henry Knowles Beecher said that a drug or doctor’s success is due to the patient’s expectation of a desired outcome. His research suggested that more than 30 percent of the time, patients felt better when they believed the treatment was going to make them feel better. Subsequent researchers say Beecher’s research was flawed, but there’s no denying that when people in white coats and medical degrees on the wall say reassuring words, people feel better. It also works when the people are wearing feathers and a loin cloth if that’s the cultural norm of what a healer looks like.

Expectations are powerful: Reference a puzzling study from the 1920s. A research team wanted to know if making factory lighting brighter would improve worker productivity. It did. But then worker productivity also improved when researchers made the lighting dimmer. The secret? The workers came to expect that any change would make them more productive, no matter whether they could see or were working in the dark.

We’re still in the dark regarding the Placebo Effect. It might prove to be the real mechanism for understanding healing energy based on intention and belief. It might be a vestige of old superstition and “magik.” It certainly reveals a lot about how people heal.

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