Get Healthcare, Not Sickcare: Monitoring your Health, WAY Before It Gets Serious

Traditionally, we go to the doctor's office when something looks weird on our bodies or when we don't feel so well.  Hence we typically go when we suspect we are suffering from some sickness that should be diagnosed and then cured.

That is the expectation at least.

We also go to the doctor's office for annual physicals... at least those of us that are 40 years old or more, simply because at that age, the likelihood of the doctor finding something bad growing inside of us or some systemic problem is rising.

Because of this behavior, trained into us from hundreds of years of medicine, most people loathe going to see the doctor.  However, if the doctor finds something wrong with us early, we're pretty happy.

Nowadays, thanks to the advent of artificial intelligence, diagnosis can change and, in essence, bring diagnosis into our homes and in our hands in such a way that we may not need to get checked up a the doctor's office.

The future of healthcare diagnosis is pretty bright in our near future in fact.  We're talking about AI (Artificial Intelligence) enabled handheld devices, smartphone applications and other types of applications that have access to hundreds of thousands of records for any particular issue and can "look" at a patient's body and be able to tell the patient directly, with as much or better accuracy as a specialist MD what's going on.

We're also talking about chatbots that, through text dialog with patient, is able to determine if the symptoms you describe are indicative of something serious, what it could be and what the next steps should be to get yourself better.

If something is uncovered, THEN you can go to the doctor for a second opinion and treatment.

This is amazing right?

I speak of this and the social impacts of being able to self-diagnosing ourselves effectively in the following video.

The point is, once people can easily do checkups for themselves at home or on the road on a regular basis, they can track any kind of problem very easily.  And the best part is that these tools and software as they do diagnosis to people can serve to add more data to the data pool needed for diagnosis in the first place.

You see, AI for diagnosis works a lot like a general practitioner does:

1. Take symptom information from the patient either by asking a series of questions, or using different tools to gather information about the body's condition (urine samples, stethoscope, skin and tissue discolorations, shapes etc....).
2. The doctor compares the information with symptoms and effects of different conditions, diseases on record.  GPs generally have enough experience in the field or from school and regular seminars to take educated guesses about what's going on from initial information, or barring that, they have to check with specialist colleagues that have more information or databases/books. 
3. Based on comparisons made, the GP or specialist will recommend a treatment for the condition or give you advice on health as a result, depending on what the available database of treatments says what has been effective in the past.  This may involve medicine, surgery or whatever.

Bottom line, the treatment people get is entirely based on the doctor's ability to "guess" with reasonable certainty what is the particular issue.  If the guess is wrong (it happens sometimes), then the treatment provided is unlikely to be helpful, and in some cases, it could be even harmful.

Hence doctors are very well educated and trained over many years before they can treat patients on their own.

There are two factors that technology can help to improve a doctor's performance in removing some of the guesswork or increase his odds of getting it right:

1. Getting more and better data on a patient's condition.
2. Being able to compare accurate symptoms from the patient with a larger, more up to date amount of medical data from around the world.

Fortunately on the first part, science and engineering efforts constantly create new methods to measure health points from patients, and faster.  Plus, all this is digitized today, so accessible through the Internet and computers.

Also, thanks to learning A.I. and computing, we are now able, like the technologies mentioned above utilizing A.I., to have intelligent software look through a constantly updating medical dataset and spew out results much faster than the chain of GP to specialist to database check used in the past. (and currently).

Since our smartphones have a bunch of sensors and it can have access to the database, it becomes a possible tool for self-diagnosis that can be quite efficient as an early warning system.  Other tools with more sensors can be used in a similar way as a sort of medical tricorder, to do a better job from home.

Ultimately, with these tools out in market today, people need not be afraid of the doctor because they can self-diagnose more and more from home and thus monitor their health instead of waiting until they feel really bad because "the pain just isn't going away" and potentially then have to tackle something serious that could have been identified way earlier...

Very cool stuff.  Encourage these developments and please start using them.  Some early forms of diagnosis devices have already shown that they are just as accurate as doctors in diagnosing problems, and they are available in your favorite app store already.

Good health to all!