Thinking Citizen Blog — “Doctors Are Quietly Prescribing the Apple Watch” (WSJ) — Has This Happened To You?
Thinking Citizen Blog: Thursday is Health, Health Care, and Global Health Policy Day
Today’s Topic: “Doctors Are Quietly Prescribing the Apple Watch” (WSJ) — has this happened to you?
Do you use an Apple watch for medical diagnostics? On a physician’s recommendation or on your own initiative? How about another portable medical device? Do you swear by it? Or did you try it and then stop? Today, excerpts from an article telling the story of how the Apple watch is becoming “doctors’ favorite medical device.” Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
UNAPPROVED USAGE IS LEGAL — UP TO THE JUDGMENT OF INDIVIDUAL PHYSICIAN FOR SPECIFIC PATIENTS
1. “Doctors are opting for the Apple Watch because of the device’s simplicity, affordability, and ubiquty — Apple shipped about 40 million of its watches in 2023 alone, and even more in previous years.”
2. “Compliance is also an issue with medical-monitoring devices, and this is an area in which the consumer focus of the Apple Watch, which must appeal to as wide an array of people as possible, helps.”
3. “One study of nearly 200 individuals found that they wore the watch four out of five days, for an average of more than 14 hours a day. That compares favorably with patient adherence to other treatments, such as medication and exercise, which is often a fraction of what doctors recommend.”
THE DATA FLOOD AND THE RISK OF FALSE POSITIVES
1. “One major challenge of the potential flood of data from the Apple Watch is false positives. In a world in which tens of millions of wearables might be alerting people to potential health issues, record numbers of people might head to the hospital for unnecessary and expensive tests.”
2. “This is one reason regulators scrutinize medical devices before allowing their manufacturers to make specific claims about their abilities.”
3. “Apple has gone from one part-time doctor on staff, eight years ago, to having a whole team of cardiologists and heart-rhythm specialists on its payroll today.”
POTENTIAL USES — stress monitoring, recovery from surgery (below), the heart health of children
1. “Such devices could eventually become the gold standard in how researchers study people’s stress levels, potentially leading to a variety of new public-health interventions intended to help tret stress for entire populations of people.”
2. Patent battles could be a problem for Apple as it enters new areas. “Apple stopped selling some models of its watch last year due to a dispute with medical-technology company Masimo over blood-oxygen sensing.”
3. “So many off-label uses for the Apple Watch are already possible because the device continuously gathers activity and heart-rate data. It can perform an electrocardiogram when a user initiates that process. All this data can then be exported and analyzed without Apple or anyone else intervening.”
Apple Watch Is Becoming Doctors’ Favorite Medical Device
https://spinetrak.stanford.edu/
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
My spin — then periodically review, re-rank, and exchange your list with those you love. I call this the “Orion Exchange” because seven is about as many as any human can digest at a time. Game?
LAST FOUR YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED THEMATICALLY
ATTACHMENTS BELOW:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, (11/17/20)
NB: Palestine Orion (Decision) — let’s exchange Orions, let’s find Rumi’s field (“Beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. Meet me there” Rumi, 13 century Persian Sufi mystic)
YOUR TURN
Please share the most interesting thing you learned in the last week related to health, health care or health care policy — the ethics, economics, politics, history….
Or the coolest, most important thing you learned in your life related to health are or health care policy that the rest of us may have missed.
Or just some random health-related fact that blew you away.
This is your chance to make some one’s day. Or to cement in your mind something really important you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than you otherwise would about something that matters.
