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RE: Healthcare is going Bionic - First ever ‘Digital Pill’ approved
Yikes man. I think this is more scary and controlling than cool and beneficial. Sounds like Big Brother to me. If I don't want to take my meds one day and I'm on one of the trackers, can they call CPS to come take my kids away? Or send me to jail? Just because my doctor thinks I should be taking whatever it is. If I get a second opinion and they don't agree with the first doctor, but I'm being told I have to be on the tracker, what happens then? There are ways around actually taking it too if all it has to do is come into contact with stomach acid - throw up on the pill, have someone else take it, give it to your dog. Man, this is sounding better and better the more I think about it. ;) Yikes.
I agree with you!
It's voluntary - patients can choose to take part or not, it is just a way of trying to address a clear problem. For example if a patient is very forgetful or disorganized - which is often the case with mental health - then this could send reminders and help them to manage their illness better
I am now aware of doctors forcing patients to take specific medications. But if your doctor prescribes something and you don't want to take it, then you need to go and talk to your doctor. I don't think this will change anything in that scenario ;-)
The only scenario I can see where it may be used in a forceful way is in a criminal setting
But to your general point, I think that there are concerns over data privacy and so on - it's very early still
Cheers
I know people who have had CPS called just for asking for a second opinion because it delayed treatment for their child. I also know of cases where the parents decided to look for an alternative cancer fighting medication instead of giving their child chemo and the child was taken away because the "doctor always knows best, the parent doesn't have the child's best interest at heart." Even the little boy recently whose doctors decided he would die at the hospital (in England) while the parents had found alternative treatments in the US. The hospital wouldn't release him for treatment. You see, doctors, hospital, governments always know what is best and will do anything to make you do it. Yikes. The less power/control they have, the better. This might be voluntary now, but when will it be massed produced and rolled out for everyone and all pills? Just sharing my thoughts.
Me too! All of this tends to get very emotive and nobody wins these debates, so I tend to avoid them...
But just to touch on the two examples you cite
Knowing nothing about the first - looking for alternative treatment options is great if they exist, but if parents are refusing proven treatments in order to try unproven ones then that gets pretty complicated. Science may not be perfect and we have a lot to learn, but it's the best we have...
For the second, the case of the little boy in the UK is incredibly sad, made all the sadder by the level and nature of the press coverage in the UK and US. The article linked below is well worth a read, in particular the passage about the US professor and his 'treatment'
http://www.melaniephillips.com/cruel-ignorant-campaign/
Cheers
The thing with Charlie is they didn't even give the treatment a chance to work - whether it did or not - they decided for his parents that he would die at the hospital. He couldn't even be taken home to die. Sad. Yes, media coverage was crazy for all of that and I don't even live in the US! It was all over my fb and msn news. I can't imagine what the TV news was saying (I always have steered clear of that though)! Thanks for the link to the article. Yes, dealing with stuff like this is always emotional and I tend to now be more conservative than I may have been in the past. This is a short 4 minute clip a friend shared on fb today that I thought was applicable in some ways to our discussion. :) https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/887406 "Parental Authority Should Be Overridden for a Sick Child" - He says at the end that parents whose kids die because they did something other than the prescribed route should be prosecuted. Not spend time in jail but just set a precedence by being prosecuted and receive community service. So he is saying parents should not be allowed to make medical decisions for their kids, but where does that stop? Anyway, the technology in this pill is pretty amazing - it just freaks me out at the same time. ;)
The thing with Charlie is that - from everything I have read - there never was a chance. Of course he deserved every chance to live, but this was not a chance - the doctor that got involved in this despite having never seen him or his scans admitted as much. His amazing new ‘treatment’ had never even been tested on an animal before, never mind a human. But he thought it might be a treatment option for children in the future. And then the press picked it up, and then the Pope and Donald Trump and every other idiot looking for some publicity. And they gave the parents false hope - the parents rightly did everything they could to save their child, but they were surrounded by people who, just perhaps, had other motives. That is what is most sad.
The link you sent wouldn’t open - can you re-send.
Here is my two cents on parental authority:
I wrote a post a few weeks ago on a new treatment - CAR-T therapy - for leukaemia. This treatment is working in many children that would otherwise die. Imagine two sets of parents with children eligible for this treatment
Parents 1 says that they refuse the treatment because they want to try unproven alternative therapies - here, in my opinion, there needs to be an intervention. There should be no parental authority whatsoever here.
Parents 2 say that they accept the treatment, even though they would prefer to use alternate therapies. They ask if they can use the alternative therapies as well. This sounds ideal to me
In short - my view, which is just my view, is that parental authority should absolutely be overridden if what the parents are trying to do is clearly (in as much as we scientifically know right now) not in the best interests of their child
Anyway, I think I am done for a Friday evening!!
Cheers
We will have to agree to disagree on this point. :) I checked the link and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Maybe if you refresh or search for the video Perspective > Ethics: Today's Hot Topics for Nov. 1, but it sounds like you do believe what the doctor says and that is where we disagree.
For sure we can agree to disagree - nothing wrong with that!
Have a good weekend!
Thank you! You have a great weekend as well. :) Nice, non-rainy weather here in Panama at the moment. ;)