I'd rather make my own choices, thank you very much.
This is extremely condescending and also very profitable for the medical industry. On the one hand we have a wild west market where hospitals, pharmaceuticals and doctors can see all data and charge whatever prices they feel like. For the patient it's a market where we aren't even allowed to collect data about ourselves, aren't allowed to import drugs that are approved and safe somewhere else and with many treatments we won't even get an price before it's done. But we have to pay. Talk about asymmetry!
Speaking of self diagnosing: I went to several doctors about my joint pain and chronic headaches. they all wanted to describe steroids, anti inflammatories and whatever. Turns out if I reduce sugar, I am totally fine. I came up with that after reading some literature and testing on myself. None of the doctors mentioned this for the hundreds of dollars in deductible and copay this cost me. Self diagnosis works. I know there are limits to this but many of us can read the medical literature as well as doctors and draw our own conclusions.
Speaking of joint pain, also consider:
1. Avoiding microplastics. Wash everything and filter your water, but not with a resin based filter that leaks more plastics than it removes. Avoid contact of food and drink with plastic.
2. Sometimes it's due to gut dysbiosis. In fact this goes hand in hand with the sugar theory. Antibiotics can often fix it, although the exact antibiotic needed can vary significantly.
Don't sites like Zenni Optical already offer this?
It's an American company. AFAIK there is no regulation in the US that requires prescription from a doctor to get the glasses.
.33 of 1.15 was amazing for computers, comfortable but I can still look at distance somewhat
There was an option to upload my prescription, so they could auto-detect the values from it. But there's a button just below that for "manually enter". I never saw any other prompts, on the way to checking out.
Fwiw, it would be very hard for the government to correctly investigate and accurately prove in court, since it will require a statistical proof over many patients that get tested at both good and bad places.
You state this like it is standard practice, like all opticians do this. What evidence do you have?
> Seems like the medical world is sometimes a bit too paternalistic
The charitable explanation is this: why would you want to measure those specific biometrics in the first place? Normies normally don't do stuff like that. Do you suspect you may have some medical issue that those biometrics would help you diagnose? Did someone tell you that, or did you read about it on-line? If the answer to those last questions is "yes", then the system really wants you to visit an actual doctor before you go out on your own and hurt yourself (and/or get scammed while also hurting yourself). It's not that they're worried a glucose monitor - or any other measurement tool - will kill you; it's just that it's hard enough to get people to visit the doctor over literally anything, from inconveniences to immediate life threatening dangers, so the system takes every opportunity to nudge you to cross paths with it.
Realistically, the medical community is extremely gate-keeper oriented. The doctor shortage is entirely fabricated by organizations run by doctors. Some barrier to providing medical care is good, of course.
Realistically, we don’t have a lot of data on the blood glucose levels of healthy people. The explosion of Fitbit’s and Oura rings and similar products gave us an explosion in data on basic vitals of millions of people during sleep. This can inform a ton of research, even if the quality of data is not as high as in a clinical setting. The difference between collecting 40 hours a week of data on 5 people vs 40k hours on 5k people (or more!) is huge in a research setting.
I used to work doing ML to measure and improve athletic performance, and to measure and detect physiological strain and risks during physical exercise. Our limitation was always access to enough data to not overfit. Compared to data corpus’s using in “generative AI” or image recognition models, or any other number models that are now standard in industry, we’re still in the Stone Age.
Maybe this attitude needs to stop. Get people more engaged with their health while collecting data so they can show up to their doctor with more information.
We don’t shut down the sale of car parts because Normies don’t normally do their own car repairs. Even if only a small But passionate group takes control of their health data collection, why stop them?
> We don’t shut down the sale of car parts because Normies don’t normally do their own car repairs.
We actually have done this, across industries. And now we have a "right to repair" movement because people realized their freedoms were curtailed.
It's important that we don't disrupt people's ability to learn about their own body. Some things are a health risk, and we want to prevent scams, but we shouldn't lock people out behind expensive and bureaucratic gate keepers.
The difference is that for tests requiring doctor requisitions that is the government locking down access, whereas right to repair is laws preventing companies from locking down access (to increase their profits)
Plus, the whole host of problems that occur when there's too much or too little insulin in your body. Comas and death in both directions! For better or worse, having certification and a professional watching after it is not the worst thing for a newbie on a dexcom monitor.
We've had the devices for almost 20yrs, just not available over-the-counter.
> the whole host of problems that occur when there's too much or too little insulin in your body
Which healthy bodies regulate. This device does NOT administer insulin, and it's not a tool for insulin administration in any way. This tool is only approved for use for people who do NOT have insulin prescriptions. This is a tool for healthy people to monitor their levels.
I guess the thing is that in countries where there is universal healthcare, gating is necessary to contain costs for patients who don't have a medical need. In countries without universal healthcare, the downside of prescription->OTC is shifting costs onto the patients where insurance may not cover them.
The only reason I can think of is: supply is short and they need to be preserved for diabetics.
But if supply is not short, why should I need to go through a gatekeeper to measure my own biometrics?
Same with glasses. If I want to buy a pair of glasses with arbitrary optical properties, why shouldn't I be able to?
Seems like the medical world is sometimes a bit too paternalistic, probably to keep themselves cemented as middle men, like a car dealer preventing consumers from buying directly from source.
To be fair, certain things are dangerous and probably should be gated behind a doctor for safety reasons, but sometimes I think Rx fever gets a bit out of hand.