Medical Technology Start Ups

Google Glass for Us, Not Them! We Need Them More.

The medical industry may be dangerous to your health.

Medical errors leading to patient death are much higher than previously thought, and may be as high as 400,000 deaths a year, according to a  study in the Journal of Patient Safety.

If  you dodge the bullets of heart disease and cancer you are poised for the third: your  doctor or hospital.  (Remember the one you said, “I got the best. All the doctors send their family to him. Only the best.”   I grew up in that rarefied atmosphere of Ivy med and ego stroking.  These mythical doctors know they are on shaky pedestals even if you don’t.)

This is context, let’s move on because we found a company that wants to make it easier for the third leading cause of death to maintain their operational advantage in wiping you out.  If you KNOW a lethal object is in a room or a deadly interaction with a killer might take place, would you hand the cause an easy way to obscure their actions? Of course not. If offered protection would you take it? Of course.

So why is Augmedix being given VC big bucks to help the the third leading cause of death at your expense?  Because they pitched it well?   Probably.   San Francisco based med tech start up Augmedix recently received  3.2 million in funding to rehumanize medicine.  How do they plan to accomplish this? By inserting yet more barriers between a person and a health care provider.  Google glass for doctors!  REALLY???  This is going to RE-humanize the medical industry?  Improve the relationship between people and MD’s? The inequality doesn’t jump out at you, reader?

I’ve watched their videos, read their site, seen their angel list video and other than giving the doctor more money (Augmedix says this, not me. It gives the doctor more patients to see in a day), I can’t figure out what the hell this is all about.  Ok, the electronic records thing – yes, it’s a horror. So now we have a horror to the nth degree to fix this horror.

The doctor is going to video the consult? Look up drugs? When I get handed Google glass by the gatekeepers, then we begin to re-humanize this interaction. And when the doctor’s Glass is less important than mine, we might be on a path to something real.

I’m horrified at the paternalism taken to the next level. The white coat syndrome is a serious enough problem and giving Google glass to ONLY one half of the equation here is more of the same, RECORDED. Does the person being recorded get the video sent to them? Where is MY GOOGLE GLASS? And I will decide if any other person will wear it in a medical office, not them. We have lost our collective minds and handed them over to the medical industry to highjack, brainwash and manipulate.  Oy.

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2 Comments

  • Reply
    PatientX
    June 18, 2014 at 12:01 pm

    This is the worst piece of garbage I’ve wasted my time reading in quite a while. It’s full of grammatical error, uncited and unfounded claims, and slander.

    • Reply
      panet
      June 18, 2014 at 3:31 pm

      Hello PatientX,

      Sorry you feel this post a waste of time. I’m not sure what you consider libelous (slander is verbal), or unfounded. I mention no names, so libel is out. If you mean citations (your reference to cites) as in a journal article or academic paper, that’s right, there are none, as this is neither. The stats on harm by the med industry aren’t hard to come by. I already referenced Journal of Patient Safety. Go to lef.org for the research paper that gives you this:

      Until now, Life Extension could cite only isolated statistics to make its case about the dangers of conventional medicine. No one had ever analyzed and combined ALL of the published literature dealing with injuries and deaths caused by government-protected medicine. That has now changed.

      A group of researchers meticulously reviewed the statistical evidence and their findings are absolutely shocking.4 These researchers have authored a paper titled “Death by Medicine” that presents compelling evidence that today’s system frequently causes more harm than good.

      This fully referenced report shows the number of people having in-hospital, adverse reactions to prescribed drugs to be 2.2 million per year. The number of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually for viral infections is 20 million per year. The number of unnecessary medical and surgical procedures performed annually is 7.5 million per year. The number of people exposed to unnecessary hospitalization annually is 8.9 million per year.

      The most stunning statistic, however, is that the total number of deaths caused by conventional medicine is an astounding 783,936 per year. It is now evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the US. (By contrast, the number of deaths attributable to heart disease in 2001 was 699,697, while the number of deaths attributable to cancer was 553,251.5)

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