I understand some of the current fatigue around biohacking and chasing perhaps-irrelevant metrics, but takes like this surprise me. Do you think people said the same kind of things before the blood pressure cuff became widely available? Or heart rate monitors? Or bathroom scales?
Do we just want to walk around with blinders on because we think we feel OK right now? More data is the only way to get better at this stuff.
Do you see the problem here? "yeah, but nobody's doing that" Well, then it certainly is odd of them to frame it tgat way, isn't it?
It is perhaps not the best wording but I think it's pretty easy to take that "megabytes per second per dollar" statement and choose to interpret it less poorly, and more like "having better, cheaper and more abundant useful data about yourself and your health".
Whether midjourney helps with those goals or not is a related, but different conversation thread.
So even if it is only as good as an MRI, or even 80% as good as an MRI, if it is much cheaper and much more pleasant to go through, you will get MORE people doing it, and get it prescribed in more situations.
That's at least how I read the benefits, democratization of imaging techniques rather than just improvement.
Obviously not all data is useful or meaningful, but even with the tech we already have, there's a ton of it that we're just not collecting or using.
That’s a lot of data really fast, so if you want this 3D scan of your body, yes, you do want as much data as fast as possible. 60 seconds sounds great compared to an MRI that’s going to take 15 minutes minimum & up to an hour or more.
If you don’t want then scan then carry on as usual.
I think the point many commenters are making is that yes, lots of data IS necessary to do this scan effectively and quickly, it's not the only heuristic, and it's a bit misleading to compare it to the speed of an MRI given that this does not produce the same data as an MRI.
This is deeply silly and nonsensical framing. You don't want "lots of data really fast", you want high-quality, diagnostically useful data. If the fastest way to generate that is via 15-minute MRIs, then that is vastly more ideal than a bullshit scan that takes seconds.
But that's not the point, right? The cup cost way more than your average cup. There's a certain type of person who will spare no expense on gadgets and supplements that promise "wellness," and it doesn't matter if it actually produces results or not. Ray Kurzweil supposedly takes dozens of vitamin pills a day, and I imagine the end result is expensive piss, but guys like that will pay anything for the fantasy that they could live forever.
I'm not a doctor, so I can't say if this midjourney stuff has actual value. But considering they first plan to deliver this in a fancy spa, and that it's coming from a tech company, not pharma, my reflex is to question the medical value of this data. It just smells too much like one of those pricey, dubious wellness products, and a lot of us here are the ideal marks for such a scam.
I'm 100% OK with health-conscious yuppies that have too much disposable income being the guinea pigs paying for this until if/when it demonstrates medical value.
I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the entire pharma industry is not exactly known for their motivation to research and develop therapies for the betterment of humanity. Case in point, the opioid crisis, wherein pharma’s goal was to just sell as much of the drugs as possible without regard for the impact those drugs were having on the people taking them.
I’m not saying this to defend tech — they’re guilty of the same things. I am saying this to suggest that if this play by Midjourney to reject VC funding and really lean into a community supported research lab works then you might end up with something closer to an altruistic approach than you would have otherwise.
Do you think the average person wants a higher resolution time series of their weight, or better access to a higher quality doctor, cheaper?
What on earth do you think that load of garble means? "50-100 years further along" is absurd.
Why do you think "more data" is necessarily meaningful, in a health context?
It tries to get you to imagine that advances in the last 50-100 years will project linearly into advances in the next 50-100 years.
This is not generally the way that science and medicine work. Even if you add in gobs of questionable data collected by companies with a bad track record of doing right by it.
They’re essentially trying to get you to believe that AI + your data will give you the kind of step change in medicine that we got from penicillin and X-rays/MRI/CT imaging. It’s a cheap rhetorical trick.
It seems straightforward. Imagine where medical care was 50-100 years ago, and then imagine they had all the data, resources, and practices we have today. In that case, they would have been 50-100 years further ahead than they were.
> Why do you think "more data" is necessarily meaningful, in a health context?
I think the only way to find out what data is meaningful is to collect and analyze more of it. That does not imply that all data is equally worth collecting.
So the idea is to just muck around with data, then ???, then make people healthier? To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail I suppose.
I don't work in healthcare, but it seems to me that the main problems in the field are:
1) a focus on addressing symptoms, not causes 2) pathologization of normal processes 3) normalization of pathological processes 4) financialization of care + doctor evaluations 5) regulatory capture by care providers
1, 2 and 3 are inherently philosophical problems, and there's no amount of data that you can toss at these problems to solve them. Thinking that data can solve these problems is itself part of the problem.
All I want is an AI that can take in basic information about my demographics, lifestyle, family history, religious beliefs, symptoms and vital signs - and then provide me information on tests I should run and drugs I should take - and then most importantly : tell me how to obtain those tests and drugs without ever dealing with some doctor who's 200k in debt from medical school and needs to appease their administrator by recommending x-many surgical procedures a quarter.
The incentives are bad - not the data or lack thereof.
(They need to be high quality megabytes, of course!)
Midjourney Medical looks amazingly cool. But it, and megabytes of data, is not what we really need.
You figure out this stuff by gathering and analyzing data. Whether or not this specific implementation will result in more meaningful actionable steps, I guess we'll see.
Both our unhealthy habits, and the "simple rules" to keep us healthy, have been around for decades. Building devices that give us gigabytes of data won't change anything. Dr Peter Attia makes a compelling argument in his book "Outlive" that science, as it is structured now, has achieved miracles when it comes to injuries and infectious diseases, but has been more or less powerless, for entirely systemic reasons, to do anything about neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases or against cancer and diabetes. His book is well worth reading to understand his argument--but the gist of it is that those require lifestyle changes.
The person you replied to mentioned diet and exercise, that seems like an area that would benefit directly from this type of scan. Being able to track the effect on body composition in a highly accurate way where we know exactly how much muscle and fat are gained or lost and where that's happening could tell us a lot about not only the effect on the "average person" but for each individual. I'm sure there are many other less obvious things that could be tracked using this technology.
Right now we're often in a situation where the only data you have is expensive tests ran when you're sick enough to justify them, when it may already be too late.
For data to be useful we need rigorous medical science. We have shitton of worthless medical data with little science behind it.
In the USA, an annual physical includes a good deal of blood tests covered 100% by ACA-compliant insurance plans. The problem is most people don't do it.
As a person with a few chronic conditions, I'm getting bloodwork done every few months at the cost to me of $5/mo (heavily discounted by my insurer's portion of the payment).
What I have found is people who complain about the cost of the tests either don't have insurance (with many excuses for that: I'm too healthy, I can't afford it, doctors are for sick people, etc.) or don't go to the doctor, even though they pay a healthy percentage of their income for the privilege.
Health Insurance is too expensive to not use it. Get every bit of free benefit out of your insurer as you can (gym memberships, annual physicals, drug/alcohol counselling, lots of screenings and vaccines, etc), and if they are going to charge you and/or your employer to the tune of $2000/mo, fucking use it!
When I first started getting annual blood tests there were two values in particular that were consistently elevated. A bunch more tests and some specialist visits later the explanation was that I have a harmless genetic mutation that just causes those values to be high.
A few years back I had some different values pop high. They implied scary things. More specialist visits than before. A lot more tests. After months of that all of the scary things were eventually ruled out. And then the values went back to normal. Nobody has an explanation even now.
This is just with a pretty standard battery of tests: CBC with differential, comprehensive metabolic panel, lipid panel, TSH with reflex, vitamin D. They catch enough bad things that they're generally worth ordering on a regular basis for healthy people at annual physicals. The occasional wild goose chases like what happened with me is the price we pay for catching the more serious things.
I guess we'll see just how valuable monthly whole body ultrasounds are. There's a real risk that it will catch a lot of benign things without catching enough serious things.
> I guess we'll see just how valuable monthly whole body ultrasounds are. There's a real risk that it will catch a lot of benign things without catching enough serious things.
I'm all for blood tests, I'm 1000% against everyone getting ultrasounds regularly. I have done them a few times for specific cases, and every time they have found something that looked absolutely terrifying, that turned out to be benign. And the time between ultrasound and biopsy is weeks sometimes, which is even more terrifying while you sit there wondering if you are dying.
Could this much potentially frivolous data unlocked for semi-literate worriers and conspiracy theorists lead to whole subreddits full of people freaking out about questionably meaningful physiological aberrations? Definitely. But that's just a variation of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," and I believe we crossed that threshold as a society some time ago. So bring on the terabytes and let's see what we can do with them.
Don't get me wrong, I'm also privileged. I can pay for pretty much any type of medical intervention that I'd need. So my variables are usually "comfort", "speed", "convenience", etc. But I know that this is NOT the most common scenario for everybody.
"More data" is quite literally irrelevant.
Stand on a scale at the same time of day, every day. Track your intake. Track your output. See your PCP for your free AWV-equivalent, and keep an eye on your metrics.
But no, we need GB of scanner outputs because some medically-illiterate (but still the smartest-guy-in-the-room) techbros want them for... reasons.
"Megabytes per second per dollar" may not be the optimal way to phrase this, but cost and efficiency are a real concern.
You want technology to train you how to avoid environmental factors and then give you treatment?
we're still very far away from eliminating humans in the loop from medicine.
This will never happen and arguably should not be the *medical* system's problem. It is just not feasible
Being able to get free tests every 6 months directly from the facility would be an example of a feasibly proactive measure the system could do for us.
Maybe you’re only thinking of a system that will somehow get people to eat healthy and exercise?