Technology
health checkpoints from a company called SoloHealth are now present in stores
like Walmart. For free, customers can screen their vision, weight, BMI and
blood pressure in just a few minutesA. They also enter information about their diets and health, and
the machines offer health care advice. The company, who is trying to get the
FDA to make certain medications available over the counter, hopes that the
machines will eventually do more. They will allow customers to self-diagnose
and medicate for conditions such as high cholesterol, and they will assess
whether or not customers are at risk for diabetes, for example. The
technological revolution of health care is often applauded as a way to make
health care more affordable. Some argue that the machines will benefit people
by allowing them to track their health themselves, even if they do not visit a
doctor.
However,
there are many ethical and medical issues involved in this emerging self
-diagnosis and treatment system. First, there is the issue of privacy. Customers
are voluntarily offering private information about their health and lifestyle,
so their privacy is not protected under law. It is impossible to know whether
the companies will store this information or what they might do with it. Advertisements
that appear on the machine are already targeted to the customers’ answers about
their health, and the machines send advertisements and follow up emails to
customers who enter their email addresses. It is clear that the purpose of
these machines could easily be switched from providing good health care advice
to using customers’ information to target advertising and keep customers
shopping at Walmart. This could potentially result in inadequate or framed
healthcare advice, which could be very dangerous to customers.
I think
that the major issue with this development, though, is the possibility that
customers will start to value check-ups with actual doctors even less. These
machines, whether it is the company’s intent or not, send the message to
customers that self-diagnosis is generally sufficient, possibly equivalent to
seeing a doctor. However, this is a dangerous message to send. Certain symptoms
may seem minor to a non-trained individual, and when that individual inputs
these symptoms, the machine could validate their opinion and direct them to a
simple over the counter medicine. However, a physician might see that simple
back pain or a sore throat is masking a more serious disease. If caught early,
perhaps at a yearly check-up, better treatment is probably available. However,
if the individual thinks that his own opinion is sufficient and he thus feels
no need to see a doctor, then there could easily be sufficient time for a serious
disease to worsen, limiting viable treatments. Annual check-ups with doctors
are important because doctors are trained to see what the average individual
cannot and to ask questions that other people might not realize are relevant.
If people learn to think that every average Joe can play the role of doctor
with the help of these self-diagnosis machines, more and more people will skip
annual checkups, saving money because they think that consulting these machines
and websites like webmd constitutes sufficient health care. Thus, more people’s more serious conditions
will go undiagnosed for longer, a very serious problem.
Overall,
machines could easily offer health care advice of bad quality, either because
they are inappropriately geared towards advertising or because the connections
that a doctor might see go unnoticed. Also, they might give people a false
sense of security that they do not need to see doctors. Thus, we must proceed
with caution when making technologically aided self-diagnosis a larger part of
the health care system.
http://www.bioethics.net/2013/02/walmart-health-screening-stations-touted-as-part-of-self-service-revolution/
No comments:
Post a Comment