The Emerging Age of Techonomic Health: Self-tracking

Measuring ourselves with finer and finer detail is one of the rapidly-developing trends that suggests big changes afoot in how we will conceive of medical diagnosis and treatment. It should lead to more intelligent identification of what leads to various medical conditions, and throw much current medical research into a new light. In effect people will be able to begin to conduct p2p drug effectiveness tests, for one thing. This interesting article by Quentin Hardy in the New York Times touches on some of the implications. Hardy emphasizes, as an American writer almost reflexively has to, the potential privacy implications. But in most of the world such considerations will be almost entirely absent, since people are more interested in rapid economic and health improvements there than they are in protecting themselves from letting others, even government, know details about them.