STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Wednesday, 19 June 2013

[bread_and_roses]

20. "entrepreneurialism" run amok - 40,000 medical "apps"

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/06/18/192777704/patients-lead-the-way-as-medicine-grapples-with-apps

Health apps ... are turning smartphones and tablets into exercise aids, blood pressure monitors and even devices that transmit an electrocardiogram. But the explosion of apps is way ahead of tests to determine which ones work.

... Doctors aren't sure which of the roughly 40,000 do what they claim to do.

... "It's the Wild West and someone needs to come in and at least help the consumers and the clinicians and the payers sort through the forty thousand-plus apps that are already out there," says Chodor.

... Ferris ran a of apps that claim to detect skin cancer based on a picture of a mole. Only one of the apps sends the picture to a dermatologist. It was right 98 percent of the time.

Three others, say Ferris, could be dangerously wrong. "The best of them missed melanoma 30 percent of the time," she says. "The worst of them missed melanoma over 90 percent of the time."

The human brain is not designed to compare and evaluate 40,000 items. Or even some subset of that (say for diabetes). So, of course, "entrepreneurs" are looking to make money designing programs to do the evaluating. So how many of those will we have to choose from?

"Entrepreneurialism" has also given us, for instance, entire supermarket shelves - hell, half an isle - filled with artificial air fresheners - chemicals packaged in plastic - putting goddess knows what burden on the environment in the extraction of oil, the production, packaging, and disposal - so we can exercise our "choice."

This is good for us?