tem is the patient”.
Technologies for data collection and analysis on Smartphones are part of this movement from the “centric patient”, expressing this refocusing on the patient of numerous activities of early detection of the disease, follow-up or care. The tests conventionally carried out in the laboratory will soon be possible on your Smartphone (some are already done such as glucose level, blood pressure, etc.). The Smartphone could thus become “a laboratory on a chip” (“lab on a chip”), the next step in the digitization of the patient being the “laboratory in the body” (“lab in the body”), this expression symbolizing the ability to develop nanotechnologies which can be integrated into the human body and which can provide continuous information on the state of health. However, this change is not without consequences.
First, the relationship between doctors and patients is changed. Not all doctors are prepared for this evolution of the patient, who may develop resistance to it. From a practical point of view also, the consultation time (in general medicine) remains limited (16 minutes on average), making it difficult to introduce a possibly contradictory debate confronting the expertise of the patient with that of the doctor. The place of social networks and discussion forums being more and more large, these could appear in the future as a complement to the traditional relations of doctor-patient consultation.
Second, a question relates to the quality of the expertise developed by the patient. One of the dangers highlighted in this report is to observe an expertise of the patient or of the citizen based at least in part on erroneous information, or information which requires a minimum of expertise and technicality to be understood. public information, social networks, performance objectives integrated into connected tools). The quantity and variability of information are involved in particular in the emergence of cybercondriaques: the invasion of information and data produced by multiple sensors which gradually dictates a theoretical path (threshold number of steps, calories, algorithm which he considers realistic, transform the patient into a hypochondriac.
In this regard, the mastery by physicians, and more generally by health organizations and professionals, of these same information and communication tools, constitutes a real challenge. Today, the healthcare professional remains the trusted person. He must then seize this opportunity to help the patient, not to learn, but to learn better by referring him to reliable sources of information and by guiding him towards a reasoned use of these new tools.
Thirdly, following on from the previous questioning, we must ask ourselves about the potential limits of patient autonomy in managing their health. Problems arise in particular with regard to self-medication in the face of the now direct sale of medicines to the consumer via the Internet (direct-to-consumer). This is the case of Viagra, used for erectile dysfunction, which sometimes only serves a goal of improving performance, or other drugs like Lipitor, lowering cholesterol levels. To the risks of misuse of therapies is added a lack of knowledge of their undesirable effects. These can prove to be underestimated in clinical trials carried out upstream, often on a small number of people (200 for example), and do not prevent serious side effects in the case of a sale at very large ladder .
The dissemination of incomplete information via the Internet can also contribute to this phenomenon. We also think of examples as simple as sunscreens that do not protect from UVA rays, because only UVB rays are regulated in the United States.
Thus, if a progressive access of individuals to their medical information is envisaged, the quantity, accessibility (in the sense of the capacity for interpretation and analysis) as well as the quality of the information available today is not guaranteed . As a result, self-diagnosis and its direct consequence, self-medication, remain risky practices, especially when they are likely to affect mi