The Silicon Valley Health Trend Making Doctors Nervous

Opinion|The Silicon Valley Health Trend Making Doctors Nervous

Americans have spent billions of dollars tracking themselves: their steps, their blood oxygen saturation, their sleep cycles, their glucose levels. Is any of this data making us healthier?

That’s the question the Opinion writer David Wallace-Wells poses to Dr. Rachael Bedard, an Opinion contributor and primary care doctor. In this episode, they explore what tracking ourselves, versus the population at large, can teach us and our doctors, and whether artificial intelligence might one day make sense of all of this data.

The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

David Wallace-Wells: So, Rachael, a little while ago, you got into a little spat online. Tell me what that was about.

Rachael Bedard: Yeah. So a few weeks ago, a start-up in San Francisco announced that it was going to launch a new product, which is a whole-body imaging technique. It led to this really interesting, kind of nasty at times, discourse between medical doctors like me and folks in tech. And that conversation came down to doctors being very wary that this kind of data can sometimes cause more harm than good, and folks on the tech side saying basically, how can more data ever be bad? Isn’t more data always helpful in informing decisions, research, etc., etc.? And it led to this conversation between you and I — is more data about your body always good?