[3131s]

My mom is a former nurse and she essentially diagnosed her catamenial pneumothorax (a collapsed lung that co-occurs with menstruation). Apparently elevated estrogen levels during menstruation can cause endometriosis in the chest cavity which creates punctures in the lungs. It's extremely rare so perhaps doctors didn't consider it, but she noticed it by keeping a log of when her pain was occurring. Originally more than one doctor missed the pneumothorax itself on chest X-rays and CT scans over a period of many years. She unfortunately underwent a procedure to remove part of her collapsed lung that left her with chronic pain before realizing the 'catamenial' aspect, meaning that a simple hysterectomy to induce menopause would solve the problem.

[ajmurmann]

Your mom's story and the one on the article really want me to track as many bio stats on a regular basis as possible. Ideally there would be done kind of centralized system that monitors them and also identified patterns across the population. To me that's obviously the future of medicine. Only the privacy issues are a real concern. The technical challenges (measuring the values cheaply and AI) will be overcome.