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.

The Spirit Molecule

Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema

Recently my son Dean was describing a movie he saw called “Altered States.” It came out in 1980 and starred William Hurt as a Harvard scientist who experiments with LSD while floating inside a darkened tank. As Dean talked through the movie I realized that he was telling the true story of John C. Lilly, a Harvard scientist who took LSD and developed the float tank. In a float tank you are suspended in water, in the dark, swimming in the soup of your consciousness. In that environment, Dr. Lilly said, he left his body and traveled to other universes. Going inside got him pretty far out there.

Lilly believed that dolphins were advanced beings, possibly sent from outer space or another dimension to help us. His colleagues at Harvard pretty much thought he was nuts. But, despite the controversy, certain truths of his discoveries in the dark may yet come to light.

When LSD was legal (yes, before 1966 it was legal to do scientific experiments with LSD) the elegant movie actor Cary Grant, of all people, participated in LSD-assisted psychotherapy once a week. In his autobiography he wrote that relaxing conscious control allowed him to access dream states. “These dreams, since they appear to us in symbolic guise, are fantasies … inside every one of us, waiting to be released, aired and understood.”

Enter DMT, known as the “spirit molecule.” Dr. Rick Strassman believes that this powerful psychedelic is at the root of naturally occurring psychedelic states, including psychosis and mystical experiences. He believes that when pineal gland releases DMT at 49 days after conception the event marks the entrance of the spirit into a fetus.

But before I lose you here, let’s back up a little.

Whether we think of ourselves as the human agents of higher powers or just incredible biological machines, our waking moments are pretty much ruled by one thing: A quest for dopamine. This is a chemical associated with pleasure. When your endocrine system is pumping dopamine into the bloodstream … well, in the words of James Brown, “I FEEL GOOD! Uhhh!”

So why jump out of a plane to generate thrills (and dopamine) when you can pop a pill? Why endure a 10-day silent meditation when you can do a little DMT and feel some ecstasy right now? Is the link between pharmacology and enlightenment really that simple?

Well, there could be a link altered states and healing. Roslyn Dauber is making a documentary called “Annie’s Psilocybin Therapy.” It’s about a study at UCLA. Scientists are offering psilocybin (aka “magic mushrooms”) to terminally ill cancer patents to see if the drug helps them deal with their anxiety. Researchers at NYU and Johns Hopkins also have psilocybin studies. Roslyn tells me that the initial results of these studies have been very positive.

Can drugs like DMT or LSD or mescaline (found in peyote) be used in a controlled way to heal people? Got to get back to you on that. But I do know that I will try a sensory deprivation float tank in the near future and will let you know how it goes, provided that I return to the body that I am using now.