[petke]

Automation of common medical lab tests. Not just for the sick but for the healthy. How cool would it be to every week send a drop of blood by mail and get to see a nice graph on a website how the different hormones and proteins etc in your blood has changed throughout the year. It could help you live a healthier life.

[jacquesm]

No, it would cause a lot of un-necessary procedures and visits to doctors.

[zo1]

People that advocate and complain-against "hypochondriacs" have probably caused just as much harm as good. I don't have a citation for that, but at least in my case it's made me weary to seek medical attention for small and/or embarrassing ailments/symptoms for fear of being seen/labelled as a hypochondriac. Same goes for psychiatric symptoms. So instead of being safe rather than sorry for going to the doctor, I feel like I have to justify each visit as being serious enough, even when I am paying for it.

[petke]

Its kindof strange that we see doctors time as so valuable that we shouldn't bother them unless we are sick enough we cant function. Its like taking the car to the mechanic only when the engine has come off because we don't want to bother them with the small stuff. But waiting for small problems to turn big ... Is also a waste of medical resources. And it might be too late to fix them then.

[jacquesm]

The idea is to go see your doctor when you have symptoms. If you go see your doctor every time some parameter is out of what you consider to be your personal error bands you'd be spending all day in the doctors office. Tests are useful to rule out things you don't have and to close in on the things that you do have once you have something that doesn't function well enough to notice. Until then it is a waste of resources to spend a ton of money and capacity on testing people without symptoms. Eventually those will clog up the system to the point where those that do need medical attention will end up without it.