Despite the prevalence of stories about digital medical trackers catching undetected health issues and saving lives, these devices carry their own set of risks, according to John Mandrola, MD, a cardiac electrophysiologist at Baptist Health in Louisville, Ky.
In a recent article for Quillette, Dr. Mandrola described how constantly tracking one's health can actually become unhealthy. Digital trackers regularly send users running to their healthcare providers to ask for unnecessary tests, he wrote, often creating avoidable anxiety and turning healthy people into patients.
Beyond that, the constant monitoring of vital signs turns healthy living into an impersonal, data-driven pursuit, rather than one based on more subjective qualities. "By transforming pain, illness and death from a personal challenge into a technical problem, medical practice steals the potential of people to deal with their human condition in an autonomous way and becomes the source of a new kind of un-health," Dr. Mandrola wrote.
"Sending millions more people to clinicians, creating a society even more fearful of lurking diseases, and systematically robbing people of the normal arc of life and death — this, I am afraid, is where the digital health expansion is heading," he continued. "As a doctor on the front lines of healthcare, the beginnings of digital health look ominous."
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