RFK Jr. Wants Everyone To Use Health Wearables. Should Patients Be Worried?
/By Crystal Lindell
Call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but I’m skeptical about a governmental push to get everyone to use health wearables.
How much day-to-day or even minute-to-minute data do we really need about patients? And how much health data do we really want stored in the data cloud in the sky, for anyone to access?
Health wearables is a broad category that typically includes everything from Apple Watches to blood glucose patches. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, has launched a new initiative to get everyone to use them.
He spoke about it during a recent hearing of the House Subcommittee on Health, as reported by ABC News.
"It's a way … people can take control over their own health," Kennedy said. “They can take responsibility. They can see, as you know, what food is doing to their glucose levels, their heart rates and a number of other metrics as they eat it, and they can begin to make good judgments about their diet, about their physical activity, about the way that they live their lives.
"We think that wearables are a key to the MAHA agenda -- Making America Healthy Again. My vision is that every American is wearing a wearable within four years."
It might sound good at first. After all, a continuous glucose patch is more convenient for a diabetic than having to constantly prick their finger for their glucose readings.
But I think patients should remain skeptical of such a push for more health wearables – especially when it's coming from the government.
First, I do think there’s such a thing as too much data. Most people don’t need to know exactly what their blood glucose level is at every moment of the day. I have relatives who’ve used glucose patches, and not only were the readings often inaccurate, but the very expensive patches were also hard to apply and fell off early.
In other words, having continuous data does not inherently make a health monitor better than alternatives.
Also, having access to how many steps you’re taking daily or what your heart rate is during a workout can quickly turn into an obsession, trying to get arbitrary numbers to show up on your device.
Can Tech Be Trusted?
Beyond that though, I do think people should be skeptical about multiple stakeholders having access to a bunch of our health data.
Tech companies that create the devices can’t be trusted to use the data responsibly or to keep it private. They already routinely hand over cell phone data to law enforcement agencies.
Recently a bankruptcy judge approved the sale of 23andMe's genetic data on 15 million people to a research institute. Many of those users are now scrambling to delete their data before the sale is completed.
I’m also not convinced health care providers can be trusted with it either. I can imagine a world where doctors look at heart rate data from your Oura Ring and declare that it’s too steady, and thus you must not really have chronic pain.
Patients will never win though, as I’m sure doctors will be just as likely to dismiss data that would show that your pain is legitimate as “some gimmicky” information from a tech company.
And God forbid they create a mass-produced device that can measure something like opioid use through our sweat and then make pain patients wear it to show doctors if they’re using their medication exactly as prescribed.
That’s not so far-fetched. Years ago, a tech company developed an experimental wristband device that tracked skin temperature and movement, and tested it on ER patients given opioids for acute pain. The theory was that opioid users are more likely to fidget or show restless activity when they feel it’s time for another dose, so that would be an easy way to track their opioid use.
More recently, another company has been developing a smartphone app that can evaluate your health and vital signs just by analyzing a selfie image taken by the camera on your phone.
But again, it’s the fact that this whole push for more wearables is coming from a government agency that should really alarm people.
If they gain access to it, they could use it to kick people off programs like Medicaid, increase insurance premiums, and potentially even arrest people. I especially worry that low-income patients could be coerced into using health wearables in order to continue to qualify for benefits and access to services.
Remember the COVID vaccine conspiracy theory that the government was using the vaccines to inject small microchip trackers into everyone? It was obviously untrue, but now the government literally wants everyone to wear health trackers. That should alarm anyone who was ever concerned about governmental surveillance.
My advice to patients is to resist using too many health data trackers. Yes, they can be helpful in some cases. But there is a point where both the wearer and the monitors have too much access to data.
At the end of the day, the real question is, who will be tracking the health trackers?
