In “Treat Us Right!” Banner discusses how
technology has allowed to a mass collection of data, and made it incredibly
easy for us to track our lives and health, which makes it even easier for
health professionals to take that data for biomedical breakthroughs. Banner
brings up the website PatientLikeMe, where users share their medical data for
everyone to be able to collect. However she also talks about how medical
professionals often ignore or dismiss women diagnosed with these places, which
is why the site put into places features for intimate spaces for strangers to
come together to share their stories. First off, I thought it was really
interesting that Banner talked about women and their complaints being dismissed
in medicine. I actually just watched a really interesting Ted Talk https://www.ted.com/talks/alyson_mcgregor_why_medicine_often_has_dangerous_side_effects_for_women
where McGregor talks about how drugs are sometimes tested solely on men, making
it more dangerous for women to take them due to unknown side effects based on
gender. I thought it was cool to see this mentioned because I didn’t really
know about this gender disparity in treatment in both medicine and
pharmaceuticals. Secondly, I was intrigued by this idea of a place where
strangers can share their experiences with an illness, but I also think that it
lends itself to biases that can be held up by peers that may not have the
knowledge to back it up. Since there may not be a medical professional to
provide that knowledge in the forum, this can lead to misinformation so I
questioned the wisdom of this strategy.
Going further with this concern, I thought
that this related a lot to WebMD, which a lot of people now look at in order to
try to self-diagnose their problems. However this also leads to a lot of
misdiagnoses (by themselves), which crop up even more issues such as
misadministration of drugs. This also leads to the patients taking longer to go
into the doctor to affirm their suspicions, because they think they’ve figured
it out, which can lead to worsening of symptoms. Overall, I think that we need
to tread really lightly in putting medicine in technology. I’m all for
subverting power and giving power back to the masses, but in cases where a lot
of professional knowledge that can be trusted is needed like in medicine (and I
know we can’t always trust it and health professionals do have their own biases
and make mistakes—but still), it is difficult to completely do so.
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