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)
> 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.