March 30, 2023 • 58 mins
In the near future, your doctor may begin prescribing "smart pills" -- medicines that remain in contact with your hospital, pharmacy or doctor's office and tell your health care providers whether you're sticking to the treatment schedule, along with other medical information. To the supporters of smart pills, this is a life-saving breakthrough. To critics, however, the potential threats of this technology outweigh the benefits. Are smart pills a new way to keep patients healthy longer, or another step in the construction of a biomedical Big Brother?
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, fellow conspiracy realist, we're bringing this classic to
your attention because unfortunately it got a little bit prescient,
a little bit predictive. Did you guys see the news
about Amazon doubling down into the world of medicine. No, Yeah,
Jeff's into it. Jeff wants to know. He wants to know,
(00:23):
like he wants to know what pills I'm taking, wants
to do everything. He wants to know when you poop,
he wants to know, like they're hand out waiting to
collect the sample. Yeah, Amazon Clinic has opened up. Amazon
recently bought a huge medical company, One Medical, and in
this flashback, we're talking about biomedical Big Brother I think
(00:47):
we called it, which is all about medical monitoring, right,
And this came out in twenty eighteen, and there's been
a lot of progress. You know, a lot of people
own fitbits, a lot of people own medical monitoring devices.
And the question is is this a life saving breakthrough
or is this another avenue of control? Or is it
(01:10):
six in one hand, half a dozen pills in the other. Oh,
it's all of that stuff. Guys. Look, we don't want
to make this intro too long. I just need you
to know We were recently at an airport, all three
of us, and I made a huge mistake. I went
into one of those stores where you tap your credit card,
(01:30):
you walk in, you take whatever you want, you walk out,
and your credit card gets charged, and it just knows
what I took. Getting to know you, dude. I had
an even weirder one than that. I was at Downtown
Disney or whatever it's called now in Orlando and I
went to a unique cloth just like a Japanese like
(01:51):
clothing brand or whatever, and you take your stuff, put
it in a bucket on the cash register, take you know,
checkout thing, and it knows what's in there. I don't
know if it's like R chips or wow, but it's you.
This episode all right, from UFOs to psychic powers and
(02:12):
government conspiracies, History is riddled with unexplained events. You can
turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want
you to know. Welcome back to the show. My name
(02:35):
is Matt and our compatrid Nol is a way at
the moment, but never fear. He will be returning very soon.
In the meantime, they still call me Ben. We're here
with our super producer Paul Deck and you are you,
and that makes this stuff. They don't want you to know.
Another person who works here. His name is Christopher Hassiotis.
(02:56):
He's on the research team at stuff Media. I guess
how stuff works stuff Media, and he sent us something
that he sent it to us yesterday I think, or
maybe the day before, and Ben and Olan I all
just went, oh, this is an episode that we are
producing right now and we can't wait to get you
(03:17):
into it. But we're not going to spoil it. The
first thing we're gonna do is just talk about health. Yes,
health medicine, What does it mean? Yes? Panaceas? Do they exist?
What is the cure for? What? All ails you? I
do want to say if you would like to hear
(03:38):
some of Christopher's other works, he is consistently recommending some
great stories for us to share on social media under
our various conspiracy stuff monikers. You can also hear Christopher
semi live and definitely in person behind a hot mic
(03:58):
by tuning into an excellent show that Lauren Vogelbaum produced
called How Stuff Works Now and it's sort of a
cavalcade of very interesting stories, So do check that out.
In the meantime, as Matt said health. Yes, and I
gotta tell you, I gotta tell you, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt,
(04:20):
when we when we think about health in this day
and age, you know, it's no secret that there are horrible,
horrific things going on in the world. Yes, Zimbabwe, as
we record this is currently on the tea reading and
closer to the brink of destabilization. YEA earthquake in Iran
(04:43):
Iraq border there just killed five hundred something thousand or
five hundred people. Puerto Rico also devastated by a hurricane,
killings in the United States, the Pacific, the Pacific region,
the Pacific theater is inching closer and closer to a
nuclear exchange. But despite all of these horrible things, Oh,
(05:06):
and someone keeps making Transformer movies, Paul, looking at you. No, no, no,
actually I watched Transformer movies too. But despite these horrific things,
which are not jokes, and the terrible jokes we make
about terrible things, you have to sit back and admit, overall,
(05:26):
we as a species have it pretty good right now,
especially in a medical sense. I mean absolutely. Can you
imagine getting sick five hundred years ago, even a hundred
years ago, getting sick to the point of needing let's
say a surgeon. Oh boy, yeah, yeah, And depending on
kind of how far back in the timeline we go,
(05:50):
needing a surgeon becomes increasingly disturbing. It's the worst. You know.
It's like the old story about barber poles and how
they came about. You remember that, right? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So,
way back in the day in Western Europe, there was
this concept that barbers were also inherently qualified to be surgeons,
(06:13):
the argument being that, well, if they can figure out
how to cut your hair, they should be capable of
cutting anything else. Yeah, a lot of people died, A
lot of good people died, probably some bad ones too. Yeah,
street razors could be used for a lot of things. Absolutely,
And if we were to attempt to describe all the
(06:34):
medical advancements made from just nineteen seventeen to twenty seventeen,
we would have to start an entirely different show, and
Paul Matt and I would have to go somewhere and
brainstorm title that was better than all the medical advancements
made from nineteen seventeen to twenty seventeen podcast. I don't know,
(06:55):
I'm kind of digging that you know, I think it's
a cool idea, but that name is way too long.
I think that's what makes it special. There you go, Yeah,
it is a nomenclature aside, it is an important perspective
to consider when we think about this. We can look
at it another way too. We can look at it
(07:17):
in a different direction and ask ourselves, what will people
living in twenty one seventeen think of the medical technology
and techniques used today in our time here in good
old twenty seventeen. WHOA what essentially will be the future
of medicine. Well, I mean I have some ideas, but
(07:39):
you know, you know me, it gets a little dark,
but that's okay. I'm always thinking about integrating man and
machine and how that's going to become the new normal.
But just to get this out of the way up front, Sure,
we know that this can be a touch of e
subject anytime you're talking about health, because you're also inherently
(08:00):
talking about mortality. Absolutely, and you know that is the
one thing we all have in common. But we want
to be clear. We're not doctors. Ben and I have
no physician background anything like that. We don't have degrees
in any of that, so we're not dispensing any kind
of medical medical advice to you. We're not trying to
(08:21):
tell you how to think about this stuff. We're just
gonna tell it how it is pretty much. Well, for
the record, I do know first aid, so oh hey,
me too, CPR and everything. Yeah, so if you meet,
if you meet us, and I assume Paul does as well, No, okay,
all right, okay, go to Paul if you're choking. No,
it's cool because we hang out outside of work. And
so if you if you happen to see us in person,
(08:43):
we can you know, reset your disjointed or dislocated arm
or make us splend for you or something. But yeah,
we are not giving anyone medical advice. And if you
have a compound fracture, don't call me. Okay to go
to bed with pound fractures? Yeah, all right, so we've
(09:03):
established that. Here are the facts. Here's the weirdest thing.
Over the span of human civilization, we have been making
scientific advancements that later become medical advancements or medical breakthroughs. Right. Yeah,
every time we make a mistake in some field, in
some way, we learn from it. We don't do it again. Well,
(09:26):
in theory and the weird thing is that these discoveries
do not exist in a vacuum. There's a bit of
a positive feedback loop that took a long time to
get running. There's a bit of a snowball effect that
started rolling very slowly at first. But now it is
no secret that the pace of medical advancement itself just
(09:46):
what some of our bosses like to call the cadence
of this advancement. It's accelerating, it's increasing. In an article
for Forbes, Scott Godly notes, We've got a quote here.
The pace at which fundamental discovery of basic science are
being uncovered is accelerating, as is the speed at which
medical practice is being transformed by these inventions. Metamorphic changes,
(10:10):
Gottlieb says, are sweeping a wider breadth of clinical areas
more regularly than at any time in the history of science. Wow,
that's inspiring. It is in a very real, literal way.
Time is accelerating in the medical field. Wow. I mean
(10:30):
saying that does have sort of a buzzfeedee headline to it,
but it is true. In the past. You know, the
first question is, well, well, what gives what made us
such a plotting peters or stumbling Stevens earlier. I'm just
making up names. No worries the plotting stumbling, Peter Stevens.
(10:52):
It had a lot to do with communication and how
much it cost, both in real time and in materials
to send messages to someone, especially if you're sending it
further away than inside your town for something. Right. Yeah,
we've we've mentioned this in past episodes. Long time listeners
are probably familiar with this concept, and Matt's Matt spot on, Well,
(11:15):
we say costs of communication, we don't necessarily mean how
much did it how much whatever the currency at the
time was, did it take for you to send a message.
Or it's not just that, it's not about your exffinity
account costs, right right, it's it is, as Matt said,
time and materials, and time is the primary factor here.
(11:37):
So not only could people not learn about a treatment
on the internet, which is its whole, other, whole other
sack of cats, but oh gosh, for much of human civilization,
books themselves were also incredibly rare, and literacy rates were
tremendously low. Yeah, so even if you could communicate like
(11:59):
easily in actively, maybe the person you're writing to can't
understand you, or maybe you can't understand. And most people
lived and died within a relatively small number of miles
from where they were born. So let's imagine that you're
a patient back in these days and you were trying
to get information about you know, what's wrong with me.
(12:22):
My leg really hurts and there's some kind of hole
in there. But I can't figure out what's going on.
I don't know what it is. How do I find out? Well,
that whole thing where you can't communicate very well doesn't
only apply to you, the patient. It applies to the
physician that you would want to go and see. So
here's the other thing. These physicians, you know, they're across
(12:43):
the world, and there are medical advancements happening in different pockets,
in different parts of civilization. And when you can't communicate
between let's say Britain and Italy, they're not going to
know the advancements that are occurring on the other side.
They can't compare notes exactly, so it's having to develop
almost in isolation, until you have, you know, someone who
(13:05):
takes the ship, let's say, across from Italy to Britain
and spend some time in London or something right or
some sort of emissaria is exploring for a different for
a different reason. Then they also happen to know something
very obvious to them that is unknown to the people
at the time. For instance, the idea that consuming citrus
(13:26):
fruits were impossible on a long maritime voyage will combat scurvy. Right, Yeah,
and there, I'm sure there were a lot of people
at the time who didn't know that, many because they
would never write about exactly. But you know that's that's
neither here nor there. The important part is just as
(13:47):
you said, Matt, which is that these things are developing
in isolation, and the pace of communication did exist, but
it was galacial, yes, compared to what we have today.
Physicians might also, it must be said, be bound by
spiritual or religious explanations for an ailment. You did not
get the plague because of a bite from a flea
(14:11):
that was carried by a rat. You got the plague
because you ate meat on Friday and are therefore ungodly
because you could have bought an indulgence or dispensation, but
you didn't, So for the sin of not participating in extortion,
you have the plague. But sho put a disclaimer here.
(14:35):
We're not telling you what to believe, but you know,
think with your head. All right, boy, well this is
that's not a ding on. That's not a ding on
the concept of spiritual religious explanations for an ailment, which
you know in some cases exist today. It's historical right.
People are as a species, we are explainers, we are classifiers.
(14:57):
We seek to understand the explicable and the incomprehensible, and
so we have to find a cause, we have to
have an If then the other thing that would happen
is physicians might, aside from any ideological beliefs, and ideological
is probably a better word than spiritual religious at this time,
(15:18):
aside from that, and in a more secular way, they
may cling to traditional beliefs despite indications that other treatments
might be more effective, not to mention less dangerous. Like
For a long time, there was a concept that, just
by overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the consumption of mercury
could possibly could possibly allow people to live for a
(15:44):
longer span of time, as we know, and as was
fairly apparent right to many observers even in the time
when this belief was prevalent, especially after trying it for
a little while, especially after trying it, as we know
now that consumption mercury has the opposite effect, Yes, in
(16:04):
a to an extreme degree. Oh side note, Matt, I
feel like you already know this one, so stop me.
If you've heard it, do you remember? Do you know
why the mad hatter is now Alice in Wonderland? Do
you know the story of mad hatters? No? No, no, no,
just the phrase mad hatter? I do not. So when
(16:27):
these uh haberdashers would create or form hats again, historically
they would use chemicals like mercury to assist in the
you know, solidifying the shape, right, And what happened is
that over time, exposure to these chemicals started affecting the
(16:52):
mental faculties of these hat makers, these haberdashers, and then
the phrase mad as a hatter originated from that. It's
not a it's not just a funny joke, oh March
hare by the way, of course, being like spring reproductive madness.
But the the interesting thing to me is that there
(17:14):
was some point in time where somebody, probably in Europe,
looked at someone else and they're like, hey man, I'm
worried about Steve, like he's been acting real weird. And
they're like, yeah, but his hat game is so on point. Yeah,
and that's how you end up with stuff like mustard.
Don't let's be silly. That's perfect. That is a direct quote. Yeah, Mustard,
(17:40):
that's not a serious condiment. Can you imagine we don't
really believe that. Don't send us hate mail about mustard.
So you see the problem here, folks, You see the dilemma.
There are multiple completely understandable reasons why the pace of
medical treatment and medical breakthroughs is slow at this point
(18:00):
in time. And we can journey through history and explore
this relationship between just the what we would call the
pure scientific discovery and the medical applications. Paul, can we
get like some sort of time travel noise? Okay, here
(18:23):
we go where we're in the sixteenth century. Okay, all right,
we're in the sixteenth century. That's like how everything looks
so assassined, creedy. Right now, I can hear the horses,
and you can smell the smells right, potent, yes, potent. Indeed,
my friend, we are actually at the exact, well, the
(18:47):
approximate moment in time where the concept of germ theory
was first proposed. Germ theory this is this is the
idea that somehow disease whenever your body you get sick,
it somehow linked to these tiny little things that we
now know are microorganisms, right invisible to the naked eye.
(19:08):
So over the next few centuries, now we're now we're
traveling through centuries really quickly. Over the next few centuries
there would be additional discoveries that lent further credence to
this concept. However, it wasn't until the nineteenth century that doctors,
(19:29):
or the Western ones at least, even began washing their
hands at all. What check it out, Matt. In eighteen
forty seven, a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Philip Samuel Weeiss
proposed that maternal death death during childbirth could be sharply
cut when obstetricians washed their hands before conducting you know,
(19:55):
before the that's right, have yeah, you can't unsee that. Specifically,
they recommend a chlorinated that miracle. You can't unsee that miracle.
Oh man, right, yeah, okay, I just had a flashback,
but we're good. But yes, it seems so simple, right, yeah,
(20:18):
it does seem pretty simple. Here's what happened to Ignaz. Well,
nobody took this guy seriously. He was ridiculed for having
this belief and for in his mind figuring out, oh,
this might be the problem. His colleagues just just ribbed
him the whole time. He died in an asylum in
(20:39):
eighteen sixty five, where he was put involuntarily. Yeah, because
he was crazy telling people to wash their hands. How
dare you tell me to wash my hands like some
kind of peasant doing laundry. Get out of here, simbilweis.
Go back to your room. But that was only two
weeks after guards. Let's just say they beat him up.
(21:02):
They beat him up to an inch of his life. Look,
I think we should use an accurate description. And it's
fine to beat me if you want. They beat the
everliving out of him in eighteen sixty five. He died
two weeks after this vicious beating. Only later, much later,
did history acknowledge his prescience. Yeah, his understanding, And man,
(21:24):
this guy could have saved a hole. He did to
save a whole bunch of people in a way, but
ultimately he was just persecuted for it. And Louis Pasteur
around somewhere at the same time, confirmed the germ theory
in the eighteen sixties, and then a few years after that,
Joseph Lister began introducing sterile techniques into surgery. And ah,
(21:46):
you don't have to just wash your hands, you wash
your implements too. You mean, like a peasant doing laundry.
I'm just imagining, why would you get so angry about
this idea, because you know, we have the privilege of
retrospe now, and it is an immense and powerful privilege
because you know, the average person living in the US
(22:07):
washes their hands multiple times a day, right, thanks to
pasteur And I wonder if it's just the At the time,
it was the implication that this physician is dirty in
some way, or this physician, you know, this physician's tools
are unclean. Right. So it wasn't until much much later
(22:28):
that these original findings began to significantly impact medical practice
and the experimental methods, the lab tools, the scientific insights
were finally at hand not only to explain how germs
caused disease, but to explain how this how this process
could be mitigated or somewhat controlled to help patients and
(22:53):
all in all, this took about three hundred years from
the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century. And this is
just one discovery and each single one leads to other discoveries.
And so as long as there aren't you any kind
of giant asteroids that impact your Earth or some other catastrophe,
and we'll just cross our fingers that nothing's going to
(23:15):
happen in the next few hours. Here, it makes sense
for our species to discover and apply all these new
technologies at an increasingly rapid pace. Especially you've taken into
that communication thing. Now, Now that I can get on
this laptop here and shoot an emol email off to
anybody anywhere in the entire planet that has access to
(23:36):
the Internet, I mean, we can do this right, So, yes, Okay,
It's true it took three hundred years for the world
to agree that doctors should wash their hands, but by
way of contrast, it only took thirty years for modern
scientific work on immune cells to translate into the development
of some of the world's most powerful, most efficacious drugs. However,
(24:00):
this is not all warm fuzzies, hugs from Grandma, fresh cookies,
unicorns and rainbows. Yeah, it's not even Rickshaw's stiff drinks
and lava lamps, no, sir. You See, along with the
increase in effectiveness, we are also as a species seeing
unequal access to medicine, rising cost especially in the field
(24:22):
of proprietary biotech or drugs, and we're seeing increasingly disturbing
possibilities for the future of patient privacy. And we're not
even getting into healthcare costs in the United States, which
is a whole other thing. Will inevitably be called to
make an update for that one pretty soon too, with
what's going on. But these concerns that Ben's talking about
(24:44):
about privacy, they are particularly strange. Yes, longtime listeners, fellow
conspiracy realist, you've heard us explore the erosion of privacy
of multiple fields, from the world's governments to its grocery
stores and even unto the phone you may be using
to listen to this podcast right now. But it goes
(25:07):
deeper than that. The future of medicine, you see, is
upon us digital medicine. Welcome to the rabbit hole. Don't worry,
will monitor your vitals while this handy message from our
sponsor invades your headholes. Here's where it gets crazy. In
(25:30):
a recent article for The New York Times dated November thirteenth,
actually of this year, right before we recorded this podcast,
a journalist named Pam Bellock Bellock Let's Say explores the
US Food and Drug Administration the FDA's decision to approve
a quote digital pill, Oh boy, a medicine containing a
(25:52):
sensor that can tell doctors when and if a patient
is taking their medicine. You may be asking what sort
of pill are we talking? This choice was very interesting
to us because the pilling question is a variant of
a name brand antipsychotic Abilify Yes, and this product is
(26:14):
approved for the treatment of schizophrenia, acute treatment of manneic
and mixed episodes associated with bipolar one disorder, and for
use as an add on treatment for depression in adults.
The FDA granted the approval of Abilify my site to
Otsuka Pharmaceutical Company Limited, and the sensor technology and the
(26:36):
patch are made by this company called Proteus Digital Health.
What's that you say, a smart pill? Well, how does
it work? Well, let me tell you. The patient takes
a pill, you see, that makes sense. Then the pill
sensor tracks that it's been ingested, Okay. Then that pill
sends a signal to a patch worn by the patient.
(26:58):
Then the patch sends a signal to a mobile application
that allows patients to track their medication use. And here's
where it gets really interesting for people who who are
thinking already, oh my god, my alarms going off. I
don't like this concept at all. I'm not even ever
going to use this, but I hate this idea. Well,
the patient has to give permission to the caregiver or
(27:21):
to the physicians to access the information, and they do
that through a web based portal. But in theory, your
privacy is not immediately being hacked just by taking the
pill itself. However, if you are a patient going through
you know, schizophrenia, manic and mixed episodes, bipolar disorder, serious depression,
(27:45):
making those kind of decisions become a little harder and
it's a little more gray. Yeah, agreed. And for proponents
this pill, this specific variant of the I is just
one more contribution to the growing wave of monitoring techniques
and technologies used to address one of medicine's primary woes,
(28:11):
which I was not fully aware of. Men I didn't
understand this either. Patients, you see, apparently have a real
devil of a time taking their medication on a schedule
and in the manner prescribed by their doctor or a
health provider. What does that mean that means that let's
say you have poison iving, got poison ivy really bad,
and they they prescribe to you a blister pack that
(28:35):
is essentially a steroid treatment, and you have to take
X number of pills the first day, Why number of
pills the next day, and so on and so forth
until your poison ivy is gone. You have learned your lesson,
go in peace and do not touch strange plants. Again, yes,
well yes, And this is a, like Ben said, a
(28:57):
big issue for the healthcare industrial complex. Let's call it
so what they call it patient non adherents to prescribed medication.
That's like the long way about it. And it's associated
with all kinds of things, poor outcomes for you know,
being prescribed prescribe medication that's supposed to do something, well,
(29:18):
it doesn't happen if you don't take the medication correctly.
It's associated with progression of diseases because again it's not
being treated properly. And it's got a huge estimated burden
of billions of dollars on the healthcare industry, Like it
costs billions of dollars because people don't take their medications correctly.
(29:41):
That was mind blowing to me, didn't you have the
didn't you dig up the stat there the estimate that
between one hundred and three hundred billion dollars have been
attributed to this. Yeah, yeah, that's that's just in the
US specifically, and you're talking about a privatized healthcare system.
But still that represents three to ten percent of the
(30:02):
total United States healthcare costs. So what are the top
reasons that people don't take the medicine they're prescribed. Well,
according to this one academic paper that was referencing several
different I Guess polls, number one is forgetfulness. Number two
(30:24):
is side effects or perceived side effects. Number three is
high drug costs, Like it costs way too much for
me to take all these pills. I'm gonna, you know,
I'm going to separate it out a little more than
what's prescribed, and that statistic is probably going to increase
in the US. Oh absolutely. And then number four was
just that the drug does little to nothing to actually
(30:45):
affect what I'm going through? Is that a self report
on the patient's part. These are all self reports. Yeah,
this is what patients say about why they're not taking
their medications. So maybe just to be completely clear with everyone.
Maybe maybe we should say the patient believes the drug
(31:05):
does little Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, that is all. Yeah,
patient belief all that stuff. The patient believes the drug
cost is too high according to their budget. The patient
believes the side effects are happening to them, you know,
according to them. You know, it seems strange, doesn't it,
Because while we know that there are multiple cases of
(31:32):
terrible situations happening when people are overprescribed. You know, when
someone takes a drug for a condition a but it
produces a side effect and they have to take a
drug for that side effect, and then have to take
another drug for that side effect. With this giant cocktail
of drugs are taking inside effects. And although we know
that happens, in my case, I feel like if I
(31:56):
already went I don't want to sound too Larry David
about us, but like if I already had to take
some time off from work and I had to go
to a doctor's office and I might have had to
pay to park, it was this whole thing, you know,
and uh, and then they prescribe some sort of medication
for cold or whatever. I'm going to trust them and
(32:17):
I'm gonna probably take it unless it's something really weird.
You know. All right, we're gonna we're gonna do the
first ever episode of Honesty Corner with Maddie Fred And
here it goes. I have a bad back. I've had
it for a long time. I just have back pains.
It works fine, it does everything I need it to do.
(32:37):
I can still lift heavy stuff. But man, does it hurt.
It's the only bad thing about you. By the way,
I'll stop it. Well, well, I've been to several physicians
and talked about this, finding ways to help me. And
I was once prescribed this drug called Soma, which is
a muscle relaxer, and I was told to take it
(33:00):
and then come back and see them and see if
anything happened. But I chose not to after researching the
drug and its side effects and what it does to you.
But you know that in this case, it was a
physician trying to give me a medication that would make
me feel better for my ailment. But I, as the patient,
chose not to. And I wonder, I wonder, Oh gosh,
(33:21):
I just contributed to the several billion dollars Oh yeah,
healthcare costs. That's on you now. So it's true, though
there are. There are these honest concerns, and they come
from a very valid place, right. And it's not only
is it very difficult and ill informed to call one
(33:47):
group of people in this argument the bad guys quote
unquote and another group the good guys. It's also unethical
because there are situations where okay, just a little bit
of a weird comparison, if you're cool with it. Matt. So,
I've always thought that your body, you listening to this
(34:12):
specifically you, your body is a lot like a car.
And you know, if you own a car for a while,
you are probably and you drive it every day. You
might not be a mechanic, but you know your particular
car very very well, definitely, and you know when you
know second gear slips a little, You know that you
(34:35):
might have to give it a little extra gas on
a cold day, and when to check the tires, and
that one door doesn't quite line up, but you remember
what you know that you hit something in that parking
lot or whatever. You know your car. And the thing is,
in many ways, even if you are not a mechanic,
even if you are not a doctor, your body is
(34:57):
going to be the body you know the best. The
are you know the best because you only get out
of it once when you die. Yeah. Well, okay, okay, okay,
you're right, and I'm glad you said that. All right,
So some people will tell you you can sneak out
of your car occasionally, Yeah, right, like circumstances. Yes, yeah, well,
(35:22):
I think it's I think the concept of remote viewing
or accidental astral travel as an experience, a subjective experience.
I think it's way more common, and it's often reported.
And in fact, if I recall, we did a couple
episodes on this, or we did aspects of it. Anyway,
you know, you're the car that you only get out
(35:45):
of permanently once. Yes, and with the advancement of technology,
perhaps we'll be able to just jump cars whenever we
feel like it, or get a flying car. Oh yeah,
you want to ride this? Compare the sunset. So before
we take the body as car analogy on on our
(36:06):
long road trip, we should talk about the opponents here.
I mean, we just did that extended comparison to say,
in defense of people who have decided that they are
not going to take a particular medication, because you know,
(36:26):
they have any number of valid reasons, one might be
that they have an incurable condition that they would rather
live with than suffer from the side effects of the
medication they're supposed to be taking. Right, And it goes
back to their perception of their own quality of life.
(36:48):
But again they are not They are not medical professionals
often right. But now that we've established that, we should
look at the opponents of this um of this emerging technology,
specifically of digital medicine in general. Right. You know, one
(37:09):
of the one of the biggest issues I've seen is
that the amount of money that this would save and
the benefit I guess benefit to cost ratio and all
the varying ways this will cost us as humans and
you know, as a private company selling a technology as well,
it doesn't balance out. Like they don't think this is
(37:31):
the solution to get people patients to take their medicine.
Just by having the ability to track the medication doesn't
mean that the person is going to take it. It'll
mean it'll help the physician know if they get access
to the information that the patient's not taking their medicine. Oh,
I see, because for right now it's opt in on
(37:51):
the part of the patient. It's opt in, and it's
you know, and then it will turn into opt out,
and then years from now, maybe even before your son
is in his twenties, it's going to Yeah, it's going
to be strange if it doesn't have some if a
medicine doesn't have some sort of tracer, Yeah, it's possible.
(38:13):
It's it's quite possible. At this point, opponents do argue
that this is another case of the erosion of privacy,
and one of the big sticking points is going to
be familiar to a lot of people in any medicine
related field. One of the big sticking points is the
(38:35):
sale of your the most personal of your personal information
to third parties. These could be advertisers, These could be
insurance companies, These could be employers, These could be banks. Yeah,
that's another good call. This could be these could be
any number of people, and unless laws change, you will
(38:59):
never know until maybe your maybe your bank turns down alone,
or maybe you suddenly get a higher interest rate, or
a number of things that would be seemingly inexplicable or
out of the blue begin to occur to you, and
then you have to sort of be like what's his name,
(39:21):
Guy Pearson Memento and work backwards and just put the
pieces together to figure out what happened, who sold this
and why. And again, unless the laws change, you will
also not be given a cut of what they sell.
And we do want to be clear right now, right now,
(39:43):
the party line is that this information is going to
be somehow anonymous, right, and it's just it's just to
aggregate data set to build better predictions see general trends.
I think it goes a little further than that, Ben,
I think it's a system that we set up to
(40:04):
where only your phone is going to get the information
unless you send it out to anybody else. So I
guess it would be kind of like I'm trying to
find an analogy for this, but taking a picture. Every
time you take one of these pills, it's like taking
a picture, and unless you decide to send it to
you know, your doctor or your friends, nobody is going
(40:24):
to know about it unless they hack your phone, I guess,
is the way I'm imagining it, or the server of
the company Proteus that's making the software, right, That's that's
the question, you know, And that's that's the concern. Whether
it's a government or whether it's a private entity, the
question remains the same. Who watches the watchers, right, who
(40:48):
holds the powerful accountable? And this may seem like a
little bit of alarmism. Perhaps this may seem like a
little bit of a doom and gloom for something that
is inarguably a good thing, right, especially according to the proponents,
(41:09):
because the you know, it goes back to the idea
that this could save lives. And we know that continual
monitoring has already existed, right for anybody with a fitbit
or some sort of app on your phone that tells
you to quit smoking, or to count your calories or
(41:30):
to make sure that you take a minimum of ten
thousand steps a day, we know that this stuff already exists.
This is a step to put it inside you, and
right now it's a simple check in system. Right. It's so,
for instance, right now, there is nothing to stop someone
if they for some reason said, you know what, I'm
going to take six of these pills because woo whatever,
(41:53):
I'm going to share with my doctor and they need
to know that, you know, I'm taking them this way,
there's nothing physically stopping it, you know what I mean, Like,
there's not a mechanism to prevent the release maybe of
the sure Yeah, like what if what if this sort
of technology became mandatory and not opt in and was
(42:18):
applied to legally prescribed opiates, right, which you're interesting, very
dangerous and addictive substances. So then you would be in
a situation, especially if you had a past history of abuse,
where you would be monitored to make sure that not
only did you take it at whatever pill you're prescribed,
(42:40):
that three PM or something, but that you only take
it then, yeah, and that you don't take two or
three or whatever. And then also to make sure that
that ping happens every number of times one per pill, right,
so that they know you're not selling it on the
black market. Yeah. You see, what starts as a very
(43:03):
little helpful thing does indeed have wide reaching implications. Oh yeah,
I've got two examples right here. So if each one
has a specific let's say MAC address and it's not
MAC address, but each one has a specific serial number
or something each pill, sure, then you will know if
someone sells their pills and to whom sells those pills.
If you are tracking the ingestion of these, that could
(43:27):
get really interesting in the future. And another thing was overdoses.
You if you could find a way to control the
release mechanism. You could prevent overdosing of practically anything that
isn't injectable. Yeah, and like that's the silver lining. I'm
saying totally because for proponents of this trend, make no mistake,
(43:49):
it is a trend. This is not the last you're
going to hear about this technology. In For proponents of this,
that just seems like another good thing, another tick in
the box of pros because you're saying, oh, we could
stop drug dealers. Yeah, we could maybe combat at some
(44:10):
level what are they called pill mills. Yeah, it's tough
for me to say that because different accents I have
come out. Yeah, So of course I just have to
say at that point, if you want to, I'm telling
people how to mark itself for it, but you would
just depending on what the pills made out of. I'm
assuming it can't be indestructible because you have to process
(44:32):
it through your body. Sure, but you just get the
pills and then break them up and then you know,
leave out the sensors. Oh, I see change the method
of delivery. Just saying there, but I think that's a
problem that humanity a lot of times forgets when we're
trying to solve these huge problems when you're trying to
deal especially with substance abuse of any kind. Mankind is
(44:57):
very inventive. Sure, and we'll find a way. I mean,
that's just all right, but you you owe it to everybody, Paul,
and I include it to do a gold bloom version
in that one, a gold bloom version of that one
of that line. I don't know if I have a
gold bloom. I don't think I can do it. Yeah,
you can gold blooms like life that finds a way
(45:22):
or something. I think it's worth about the cadence that
could you do that one? That was it? That was it?
Swinging a miss all right? Left pretty hard on that.
I enjoyed it a lot. That's very kind. You're a
very kind person. So there's another thing we could say
here too, Matt. It's the question would be, so we're
talking about changing the means of delivery or we're talking
(45:43):
about somehow removing the sensor. Right, Another option, at least
in this case this very into the Bilify, would be
to remove the patch. Yes, because the patch is the
means of transmission for the app on the phone and
later the web portal. That might work. However, this variant
(46:06):
of abilify is only one instance of a larger sea
change or medical advancement. Right that is probably past the
point of no return at this time. So what else
is out there? We'll tell you after a word from
our sponsor. Okay, so let's say, hypothetically, Matt, you said
(46:32):
you don't know me, you can't run my business. I'll
take the drugs I want what I want them. May Man,
you don't know me. I'm gonna take drugs I want
on my time and my schedule. All right, Yeah, that's good.
I didn't want I was going soft on a Southern
accent there because I didn't want to offend you. But
(46:52):
I think he nailed it, you know. Just it lives
inside me and sometimes it escapes. That's how I feel
about some things. Yeah, moving on, there's no need to
get get into those sorts of episodes yet. We'll wait
until next Halloween. Maybe. So you're telling me you left
me on a cliffhanger here. It's true. You said before
(47:15):
we went to the break that there are other people
making digital drugs. Oh yes, yes, of course. A Florida
company named detect Rx is making another sort of sensor
ingestable sensor. Their's is called the id cap and as
we record this, it has already been tested or it's
(47:36):
being tested on a number of different drugs, including opioids
and HIV medication. Here's all it works. It's made of
magnesium and silver chloride, and it's encapsulated with pills and
you don't need a patch because the entire time it's
inside the body, as it's being ingested, it generates a
(47:58):
low power radio signal that can be picked up by
a little antenna if it's near you. What yep, And
that's that's according to Harry Travis, the president of detect
our X. They are currently seeking FDA clearance for this
application in twenty eighteen. And of course FDA applications are
(48:20):
notoriously difficult unless you know the right people and uh,
you know, have the right political connections. Hold on a second, Yeah,
I just thought of something. With these new digital pills,
does that mean we will all be pooping out tiny
little sensors every time we go to the bathroom. I
(48:43):
mean that's the dream, right, Like especially I'm kidding, I'm kidding, kid,
that's not the dream, But especially if you're taking multiple medications,
each of them having a sensor, your bowel movement is
going to be twenty percent metal and micro electronics twenty percent. Well,
I mean depending because you're talking about a twenty four
(49:05):
hour period anyway, all right, Well, I'm just saying we're
pooping a lot of metal stuff out. So this might
sound comedic of us, and to a degree it is. Right,
we're talking about poop. Yeah, the future of weird defication's
that's something that concerns a lot of people. And I
think we earned that joke because we talked about fecal
matter transplants once years ago, and we both kept like
(49:27):
a straight street lay serious tone the whole way through. Seriously,
I don't even think we mentioned pooping back and forth
forever we have now. But even even though it does
feel comedic to a degree, it is. What we're seeing
is that every time there's a medical advancement, there are
(49:50):
inherently going to be ripple effects, many of which not all,
but many of which are going to be unpredictable, right,
and some of which may be very dang interests. Now,
back when it took us as a species three hundred
years to figure out things that seem simple today, we
had a little bit more buffer time. Collectively, we had
(50:12):
a little bit more of a of a margin in
which to experience these implications and these ripple effects as
they rolled out. But now with this increasing frequency of
medical advancements, which again barring an asteroid at gamma ray
burst a coronal mass ejection, then unless something destroys civilization
(50:36):
as we understand it, this pace is going to continue increasing,
and there are going to be smaller and smaller windows
of time to analyze, address, and if necessary, mitigate these
ripple effects. We are right now on the bleeding edge
(50:59):
of not only the future of medicine but also the
future of monitoring. Yes, absolutely, and I for one have
played entirely too many video games to be okay with this.
Looking at you, Dass specifically, looking at you, I completely
(51:19):
understand the goals set out by the healthcare industry reduce
cost and get patients to take their medicines so we
can actually help people. But and I would argue that
the cost is probably the most important thing for the
healthcare industry, at least in the United States. But I'm
not sure that trackable medicine really is the answer. And
I do agree with you Ben, like this is a
(51:40):
good stepping point in you know, the way we're going
to get to the better future, the better medicine. It's
you can definitely see the linkage there to how it
can help. But right now, I guess you just have
to take that step in order to get there. I
think you do. Yeah, you have to, right, Okay, But
it's bothers me because it feels like it's something ripped
(52:02):
out of the science fiction novel or again in data
sex that I don't want to be a part of
what happened in that's just where humans and are becoming
androids and replacing different parts of their body and upgrading
and humanity, the state of humanity is really looked into.
You're not gonna do that. You're not gonna take some
cyber implants. I you know, I haven't decided yet. Philosophically,
(52:24):
I think it's if I could just take my brain,
my neural like if you could map my brain out
and then send that as a piece of software into
a robot. I'm okay with that, I think really, because
I feel like I could live forever, but having pieces
of metal integrated into my body, I don't know. I
wonder if Paul would like get electric eyes or something.
(52:48):
He's he's saying, maybe he's giving a probably not shrug. Yeah,
he's pointing to his chest and saying pacemaker. Oh okay,
see you're saying that pacemakers already exist. So this is
to some extent already happening. Wow, we're like miming to
each other through this is great. Well, off air, Paul did,
Paul did chime in, and we'd love you to chime
(53:11):
in on air sometime. We'll see if we can convince
him in a future episode. Don't let them see behind
the curtain. Well, let us know if you want to
hear what Paul sounds like, and if he is amenable
to it, we will. We will see, we will see
for sure. But right now, we are not fans of
things being mandatory. We think that people should have agency
(53:32):
and the ability to make their own decisions. And it
is true. Look, it is true. This is not an
inherently evil thing. Yes, it just has implications. Not to
sound too much like Dennis the implication on Always Sunny
in Philadelphia, but yes, yes, it is true. And I
just want to list something that would be a very
(53:53):
good aspect of this. Imagine, if we're talking about an
elderly patient who maybe has memory problems right, and then
has a regiment of multiple drugs that they must take.
This could save their lives. Yeah, this could easily, without
a doubt, save their lives and maybe increase the quality
(54:14):
of their life at the same time. But it still
doesn't address the larger question, which is at what price
progress We have established the frequency of significant medical advances
is increasing and you know, un balanced. Overall, this looks
to be a wonderful phenomenon. It has the potential to
(54:37):
save lives, which is what medicine is supposed to be about,
saving lives and increasing the quality of those lives until
everybody finally hops out of their cars. Diseases that once
ravaged entire communities can now be fixed with something as
simple as a once a day pill schedule or a
shot in the arm. But the problem is that with
(54:59):
this still or progress in the field of medicine, we
do not see the same amount of progress, the same
increasing advances, or the frequency of advances in the halls
of government, right the people making the laws are still
moving at the same pace. We don't see it in
the field of bioethics or academia and philosophy. There are
(55:20):
people who are tackling these problems conceptually right and in
an applied manner, But the medicine is evolving faster than
the social constructs that we have to address it or
to handle it in the best possible way. And we
want to hear from you. Are you for this? Are
(55:41):
you against it? Do you think, on balance it's better
for this to exist or do you think it could
be misused abused somehow and if so in what way? Yeah?
Do you think it could benefit your life in some
way to be able to track the medications you take?
Or are you nervous about metal in your poop? I mean, honestly,
I am. We didn't we didn't prove that though. Yeah,
(56:05):
I know, maybe the sensors are made out of something else,
something biological that breaks down. I didn't see anything about
that in the messaging from the website, but you know,
perhaps so we want to hear from you. This is
typically the time where we would do shout out corner, however,
(56:25):
as we are missing our third a half where we're
going to hold because this letter that we were going
to read is a very meaningful one, and I think
we may have teased in a previous episode, Yes, solving
some of the mysteries of Georgia Guidestone, so we will
wait until we are voltrons together. Captain planted it up
(56:48):
in full force for that letter M for our shout
out corner. In the meantime, you can find us on Instagram,
you can find us on Facebook, you can find us
on Twitter, and you can write to us on all
of those avenues with suggestions for stories, with reactions, with
stuff that you think your fellow listeners would be interested
(57:10):
in hearing. It's really simple conspiracy at how Stuff Works
dot com. And that's the end of this classic episode.
(57:37):
If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode,
you can get into contact with us in a number
of different ways. One of the best is to give
us a call. Our number is one eight three three
stdwy t K. If you don't want to do that,
you can send us a good old fashioned email. We
are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff they Don't Want
(57:59):
You to Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
All right, fellow conspiracy realist, we're bringing this classic to
your attention because unfortunately it got a little bit prescient,
a little bit predictive. Did you guys see the news
about Amazon doubling down into the world of medicine. No, Yeah,
Jeff's into it. Jeff wants to know. He wants to know,
(00:23):
like he wants to know what pills I'm taking, wants
to do everything. He wants to know when you poop,
he wants to know, like they're hand out waiting to
collect the sample. Yeah, Amazon Clinic has opened up. Amazon
recently bought a huge medical company, One Medical, and in
this flashback, we're talking about biomedical Big Brother I think
(00:47):
we called it, which is all about medical monitoring, right,
And this came out in twenty eighteen, and there's been
a lot of progress. You know, a lot of people
own fitbits, a lot of people own medical monitoring devices.
And the question is is this a life saving breakthrough
or is this another avenue of control? Or is it
(01:10):
six in one hand, half a dozen pills in the other. Oh,
it's all of that stuff. Guys. Look, we don't want
to make this intro too long. I just need you
to know We were recently at an airport, all three
of us, and I made a huge mistake. I went
into one of those stores where you tap your credit card,
(01:30):
you walk in, you take whatever you want, you walk out,
and your credit card gets charged, and it just knows
what I took. Getting to know you, dude. I had
an even weirder one than that. I was at Downtown
Disney or whatever it's called now in Orlando and I
went to a unique cloth just like a Japanese like
(01:51):
clothing brand or whatever, and you take your stuff, put
it in a bucket on the cash register, take you know,
checkout thing, and it knows what's in there. I don't
know if it's like R chips or wow, but it's you.
This episode all right, from UFOs to psychic powers and
(02:12):
government conspiracies, History is riddled with unexplained events. You can
turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want
you to know. Welcome back to the show. My name
(02:35):
is Matt and our compatrid Nol is a way at
the moment, but never fear. He will be returning very soon.
In the meantime, they still call me Ben. We're here
with our super producer Paul Deck and you are you,
and that makes this stuff. They don't want you to know.
Another person who works here. His name is Christopher Hassiotis.
(02:56):
He's on the research team at stuff Media. I guess
how stuff works stuff Media, and he sent us something
that he sent it to us yesterday I think, or
maybe the day before, and Ben and Olan I all
just went, oh, this is an episode that we are
producing right now and we can't wait to get you
(03:17):
into it. But we're not going to spoil it. The
first thing we're gonna do is just talk about health. Yes,
health medicine, What does it mean? Yes? Panaceas? Do they exist?
What is the cure for? What? All ails you? I
do want to say if you would like to hear
(03:38):
some of Christopher's other works, he is consistently recommending some
great stories for us to share on social media under
our various conspiracy stuff monikers. You can also hear Christopher
semi live and definitely in person behind a hot mic
(03:58):
by tuning into an excellent show that Lauren Vogelbaum produced
called How Stuff Works Now and it's sort of a
cavalcade of very interesting stories, So do check that out.
In the meantime, as Matt said health. Yes, and I
gotta tell you, I gotta tell you, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt,
(04:20):
when we when we think about health in this day
and age, you know, it's no secret that there are horrible,
horrific things going on in the world. Yes, Zimbabwe, as
we record this is currently on the tea reading and
closer to the brink of destabilization. YEA earthquake in Iran
(04:43):
Iraq border there just killed five hundred something thousand or
five hundred people. Puerto Rico also devastated by a hurricane,
killings in the United States, the Pacific, the Pacific region,
the Pacific theater is inching closer and closer to a
nuclear exchange. But despite all of these horrible things, Oh,
(05:06):
and someone keeps making Transformer movies, Paul, looking at you. No, no, no,
actually I watched Transformer movies too. But despite these horrific things,
which are not jokes, and the terrible jokes we make
about terrible things, you have to sit back and admit, overall,
(05:26):
we as a species have it pretty good right now,
especially in a medical sense. I mean absolutely. Can you
imagine getting sick five hundred years ago, even a hundred
years ago, getting sick to the point of needing let's
say a surgeon. Oh boy, yeah, yeah, And depending on
kind of how far back in the timeline we go,
(05:50):
needing a surgeon becomes increasingly disturbing. It's the worst. You know.
It's like the old story about barber poles and how
they came about. You remember that, right? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So,
way back in the day in Western Europe, there was
this concept that barbers were also inherently qualified to be surgeons,
(06:13):
the argument being that, well, if they can figure out
how to cut your hair, they should be capable of
cutting anything else. Yeah, a lot of people died, A
lot of good people died, probably some bad ones too. Yeah,
street razors could be used for a lot of things. Absolutely,
And if we were to attempt to describe all the
(06:34):
medical advancements made from just nineteen seventeen to twenty seventeen,
we would have to start an entirely different show, and
Paul Matt and I would have to go somewhere and
brainstorm title that was better than all the medical advancements
made from nineteen seventeen to twenty seventeen podcast. I don't know,
(06:55):
I'm kind of digging that you know, I think it's
a cool idea, but that name is way too long.
I think that's what makes it special. There you go, Yeah,
it is a nomenclature aside, it is an important perspective
to consider when we think about this. We can look
at it another way too. We can look at it
(07:17):
in a different direction and ask ourselves, what will people
living in twenty one seventeen think of the medical technology
and techniques used today in our time here in good
old twenty seventeen. WHOA what essentially will be the future
of medicine. Well, I mean I have some ideas, but
(07:39):
you know, you know me, it gets a little dark,
but that's okay. I'm always thinking about integrating man and
machine and how that's going to become the new normal.
But just to get this out of the way up front, Sure,
we know that this can be a touch of e
subject anytime you're talking about health, because you're also inherently
(08:00):
talking about mortality. Absolutely, and you know that is the
one thing we all have in common. But we want
to be clear. We're not doctors. Ben and I have
no physician background anything like that. We don't have degrees
in any of that, so we're not dispensing any kind
of medical medical advice to you. We're not trying to
(08:21):
tell you how to think about this stuff. We're just
gonna tell it how it is pretty much. Well, for
the record, I do know first aid, so oh hey,
me too, CPR and everything. Yeah, so if you meet,
if you meet us, and I assume Paul does as well, No, okay,
all right, okay, go to Paul if you're choking. No,
it's cool because we hang out outside of work. And
so if you if you happen to see us in person,
(08:43):
we can you know, reset your disjointed or dislocated arm
or make us splend for you or something. But yeah,
we are not giving anyone medical advice. And if you
have a compound fracture, don't call me. Okay to go
to bed with pound fractures? Yeah, all right, so we've
(09:03):
established that. Here are the facts. Here's the weirdest thing.
Over the span of human civilization, we have been making
scientific advancements that later become medical advancements or medical breakthroughs. Right. Yeah,
every time we make a mistake in some field, in
some way, we learn from it. We don't do it again. Well,
(09:26):
in theory and the weird thing is that these discoveries
do not exist in a vacuum. There's a bit of
a positive feedback loop that took a long time to
get running. There's a bit of a snowball effect that
started rolling very slowly at first. But now it is
no secret that the pace of medical advancement itself just
(09:46):
what some of our bosses like to call the cadence
of this advancement. It's accelerating, it's increasing. In an article
for Forbes, Scott Godly notes, We've got a quote here.
The pace at which fundamental discovery of basic science are
being uncovered is accelerating, as is the speed at which
medical practice is being transformed by these inventions. Metamorphic changes,
(10:10):
Gottlieb says, are sweeping a wider breadth of clinical areas
more regularly than at any time in the history of science. Wow,
that's inspiring. It is in a very real, literal way.
Time is accelerating in the medical field. Wow. I mean
(10:30):
saying that does have sort of a buzzfeedee headline to it,
but it is true. In the past. You know, the
first question is, well, well, what gives what made us
such a plotting peters or stumbling Stevens earlier. I'm just
making up names. No worries the plotting stumbling, Peter Stevens.
(10:52):
It had a lot to do with communication and how
much it cost, both in real time and in materials
to send messages to someone, especially if you're sending it
further away than inside your town for something. Right. Yeah,
we've we've mentioned this in past episodes. Long time listeners
are probably familiar with this concept, and Matt's Matt spot on, Well,
(11:15):
we say costs of communication, we don't necessarily mean how
much did it how much whatever the currency at the
time was, did it take for you to send a message.
Or it's not just that, it's not about your exffinity
account costs, right right, it's it is, as Matt said,
time and materials, and time is the primary factor here.
(11:37):
So not only could people not learn about a treatment
on the internet, which is its whole, other, whole other
sack of cats, but oh gosh, for much of human civilization,
books themselves were also incredibly rare, and literacy rates were
tremendously low. Yeah, so even if you could communicate like
(11:59):
easily in actively, maybe the person you're writing to can't
understand you, or maybe you can't understand. And most people
lived and died within a relatively small number of miles
from where they were born. So let's imagine that you're
a patient back in these days and you were trying
to get information about you know, what's wrong with me.
(12:22):
My leg really hurts and there's some kind of hole
in there. But I can't figure out what's going on.
I don't know what it is. How do I find out? Well,
that whole thing where you can't communicate very well doesn't
only apply to you, the patient. It applies to the
physician that you would want to go and see. So
here's the other thing. These physicians, you know, they're across
(12:43):
the world, and there are medical advancements happening in different pockets,
in different parts of civilization. And when you can't communicate
between let's say Britain and Italy, they're not going to
know the advancements that are occurring on the other side.
They can't compare notes exactly, so it's having to develop
almost in isolation, until you have, you know, someone who
(13:05):
takes the ship, let's say, across from Italy to Britain
and spend some time in London or something right or
some sort of emissaria is exploring for a different for
a different reason. Then they also happen to know something
very obvious to them that is unknown to the people
at the time. For instance, the idea that consuming citrus
(13:26):
fruits were impossible on a long maritime voyage will combat scurvy. Right, Yeah,
and there, I'm sure there were a lot of people
at the time who didn't know that, many because they
would never write about exactly. But you know that's that's
neither here nor there. The important part is just as
(13:47):
you said, Matt, which is that these things are developing
in isolation, and the pace of communication did exist, but
it was galacial, yes, compared to what we have today.
Physicians might also, it must be said, be bound by
spiritual or religious explanations for an ailment. You did not
get the plague because of a bite from a flea
(14:11):
that was carried by a rat. You got the plague
because you ate meat on Friday and are therefore ungodly
because you could have bought an indulgence or dispensation, but
you didn't, So for the sin of not participating in extortion,
you have the plague. But sho put a disclaimer here.
(14:35):
We're not telling you what to believe, but you know,
think with your head. All right, boy, well this is
that's not a ding on. That's not a ding on
the concept of spiritual religious explanations for an ailment, which
you know in some cases exist today. It's historical right.
People are as a species, we are explainers, we are classifiers.
(14:57):
We seek to understand the explicable and the incomprehensible, and
so we have to find a cause, we have to
have an If then the other thing that would happen
is physicians might, aside from any ideological beliefs, and ideological
is probably a better word than spiritual religious at this time,
(15:18):
aside from that, and in a more secular way, they
may cling to traditional beliefs despite indications that other treatments
might be more effective, not to mention less dangerous. Like
For a long time, there was a concept that, just
by overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the consumption of mercury
could possibly could possibly allow people to live for a
(15:44):
longer span of time, as we know, and as was
fairly apparent right to many observers even in the time
when this belief was prevalent, especially after trying it for
a little while, especially after trying it, as we know
now that consumption mercury has the opposite effect, Yes, in
(16:04):
a to an extreme degree. Oh side note, Matt, I
feel like you already know this one, so stop me.
If you've heard it, do you remember? Do you know
why the mad hatter is now Alice in Wonderland? Do
you know the story of mad hatters? No? No, no, no,
just the phrase mad hatter? I do not. So when
(16:27):
these uh haberdashers would create or form hats again, historically
they would use chemicals like mercury to assist in the
you know, solidifying the shape, right, And what happened is
that over time, exposure to these chemicals started affecting the
(16:52):
mental faculties of these hat makers, these haberdashers, and then
the phrase mad as a hatter originated from that. It's
not a it's not just a funny joke, oh March
hare by the way, of course, being like spring reproductive madness.
But the the interesting thing to me is that there
(17:14):
was some point in time where somebody, probably in Europe,
looked at someone else and they're like, hey man, I'm
worried about Steve, like he's been acting real weird. And
they're like, yeah, but his hat game is so on point. Yeah,
and that's how you end up with stuff like mustard.
Don't let's be silly. That's perfect. That is a direct quote. Yeah, Mustard,
(17:40):
that's not a serious condiment. Can you imagine we don't
really believe that. Don't send us hate mail about mustard.
So you see the problem here, folks, You see the dilemma.
There are multiple completely understandable reasons why the pace of
medical treatment and medical breakthroughs is slow at this point
(18:00):
in time. And we can journey through history and explore
this relationship between just the what we would call the
pure scientific discovery and the medical applications. Paul, can we
get like some sort of time travel noise? Okay, here
(18:23):
we go where we're in the sixteenth century. Okay, all right,
we're in the sixteenth century. That's like how everything looks
so assassined, creedy. Right now, I can hear the horses,
and you can smell the smells right, potent, yes, potent. Indeed,
my friend, we are actually at the exact, well, the
(18:47):
approximate moment in time where the concept of germ theory
was first proposed. Germ theory this is this is the
idea that somehow disease whenever your body you get sick,
it somehow linked to these tiny little things that we
now know are microorganisms, right invisible to the naked eye.
(19:08):
So over the next few centuries, now we're now we're
traveling through centuries really quickly. Over the next few centuries
there would be additional discoveries that lent further credence to
this concept. However, it wasn't until the nineteenth century that doctors,
(19:29):
or the Western ones at least, even began washing their
hands at all. What check it out, Matt. In eighteen
forty seven, a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Philip Samuel Weeiss
proposed that maternal death death during childbirth could be sharply
cut when obstetricians washed their hands before conducting you know,
(19:55):
before the that's right, have yeah, you can't unsee that. Specifically,
they recommend a chlorinated that miracle. You can't unsee that miracle.
Oh man, right, yeah, okay, I just had a flashback,
but we're good. But yes, it seems so simple, right, yeah,
(20:18):
it does seem pretty simple. Here's what happened to Ignaz. Well,
nobody took this guy seriously. He was ridiculed for having
this belief and for in his mind figuring out, oh,
this might be the problem. His colleagues just just ribbed
him the whole time. He died in an asylum in
(20:39):
eighteen sixty five, where he was put involuntarily. Yeah, because
he was crazy telling people to wash their hands. How
dare you tell me to wash my hands like some
kind of peasant doing laundry. Get out of here, simbilweis.
Go back to your room. But that was only two
weeks after guards. Let's just say they beat him up.
(21:02):
They beat him up to an inch of his life. Look,
I think we should use an accurate description. And it's
fine to beat me if you want. They beat the
everliving out of him in eighteen sixty five. He died
two weeks after this vicious beating. Only later, much later,
did history acknowledge his prescience. Yeah, his understanding, And man,
(21:24):
this guy could have saved a hole. He did to
save a whole bunch of people in a way, but
ultimately he was just persecuted for it. And Louis Pasteur
around somewhere at the same time, confirmed the germ theory
in the eighteen sixties, and then a few years after that,
Joseph Lister began introducing sterile techniques into surgery. And ah,
(21:46):
you don't have to just wash your hands, you wash
your implements too. You mean, like a peasant doing laundry.
I'm just imagining, why would you get so angry about
this idea, because you know, we have the privilege of
retrospe now, and it is an immense and powerful privilege
because you know, the average person living in the US
(22:07):
washes their hands multiple times a day, right, thanks to
pasteur And I wonder if it's just the At the time,
it was the implication that this physician is dirty in
some way, or this physician, you know, this physician's tools
are unclean. Right. So it wasn't until much much later
(22:28):
that these original findings began to significantly impact medical practice
and the experimental methods, the lab tools, the scientific insights
were finally at hand not only to explain how germs
caused disease, but to explain how this how this process
could be mitigated or somewhat controlled to help patients and
(22:53):
all in all, this took about three hundred years from
the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century. And this is
just one discovery and each single one leads to other discoveries.
And so as long as there aren't you any kind
of giant asteroids that impact your Earth or some other catastrophe,
and we'll just cross our fingers that nothing's going to
(23:15):
happen in the next few hours. Here, it makes sense
for our species to discover and apply all these new
technologies at an increasingly rapid pace. Especially you've taken into
that communication thing. Now, Now that I can get on
this laptop here and shoot an emol email off to
anybody anywhere in the entire planet that has access to
(23:36):
the Internet, I mean, we can do this right, So, yes, Okay,
It's true it took three hundred years for the world
to agree that doctors should wash their hands, but by
way of contrast, it only took thirty years for modern
scientific work on immune cells to translate into the development
of some of the world's most powerful, most efficacious drugs. However,
(24:00):
this is not all warm fuzzies, hugs from Grandma, fresh cookies,
unicorns and rainbows. Yeah, it's not even Rickshaw's stiff drinks
and lava lamps, no, sir. You See, along with the
increase in effectiveness, we are also as a species seeing
unequal access to medicine, rising cost especially in the field
(24:22):
of proprietary biotech or drugs, and we're seeing increasingly disturbing
possibilities for the future of patient privacy. And we're not
even getting into healthcare costs in the United States, which
is a whole other thing. Will inevitably be called to
make an update for that one pretty soon too, with
what's going on. But these concerns that Ben's talking about
(24:44):
about privacy, they are particularly strange. Yes, longtime listeners, fellow
conspiracy realist, you've heard us explore the erosion of privacy
of multiple fields, from the world's governments to its grocery
stores and even unto the phone you may be using
to listen to this podcast right now. But it goes
(25:07):
deeper than that. The future of medicine, you see, is
upon us digital medicine. Welcome to the rabbit hole. Don't worry,
will monitor your vitals while this handy message from our
sponsor invades your headholes. Here's where it gets crazy. In
(25:30):
a recent article for The New York Times dated November thirteenth,
actually of this year, right before we recorded this podcast,
a journalist named Pam Bellock Bellock Let's Say explores the
US Food and Drug Administration the FDA's decision to approve
a quote digital pill, Oh boy, a medicine containing a
(25:52):
sensor that can tell doctors when and if a patient
is taking their medicine. You may be asking what sort
of pill are we talking? This choice was very interesting
to us because the pilling question is a variant of
a name brand antipsychotic Abilify Yes, and this product is
(26:14):
approved for the treatment of schizophrenia, acute treatment of manneic
and mixed episodes associated with bipolar one disorder, and for
use as an add on treatment for depression in adults.
The FDA granted the approval of Abilify my site to
Otsuka Pharmaceutical Company Limited, and the sensor technology and the
(26:36):
patch are made by this company called Proteus Digital Health.
What's that you say, a smart pill? Well, how does
it work? Well, let me tell you. The patient takes
a pill, you see, that makes sense. Then the pill
sensor tracks that it's been ingested, Okay. Then that pill
sends a signal to a patch worn by the patient.
(26:58):
Then the patch sends a signal to a mobile application
that allows patients to track their medication use. And here's
where it gets really interesting for people who who are
thinking already, oh my god, my alarms going off. I
don't like this concept at all. I'm not even ever
going to use this, but I hate this idea. Well,
the patient has to give permission to the caregiver or
(27:21):
to the physicians to access the information, and they do
that through a web based portal. But in theory, your
privacy is not immediately being hacked just by taking the
pill itself. However, if you are a patient going through
you know, schizophrenia, manic and mixed episodes, bipolar disorder, serious depression,
(27:45):
making those kind of decisions become a little harder and
it's a little more gray. Yeah, agreed. And for proponents
this pill, this specific variant of the I is just
one more contribution to the growing wave of monitoring techniques
and technologies used to address one of medicine's primary woes,
(28:11):
which I was not fully aware of. Men I didn't
understand this either. Patients, you see, apparently have a real
devil of a time taking their medication on a schedule
and in the manner prescribed by their doctor or a
health provider. What does that mean that means that let's
say you have poison iving, got poison ivy really bad,
and they they prescribe to you a blister pack that
(28:35):
is essentially a steroid treatment, and you have to take
X number of pills the first day, Why number of
pills the next day, and so on and so forth
until your poison ivy is gone. You have learned your lesson,
go in peace and do not touch strange plants. Again, yes,
well yes, And this is a, like Ben said, a
(28:57):
big issue for the healthcare industrial complex. Let's call it
so what they call it patient non adherents to prescribed medication.
That's like the long way about it. And it's associated
with all kinds of things, poor outcomes for you know,
being prescribed prescribe medication that's supposed to do something, well,
(29:18):
it doesn't happen if you don't take the medication correctly.
It's associated with progression of diseases because again it's not
being treated properly. And it's got a huge estimated burden
of billions of dollars on the healthcare industry, Like it
costs billions of dollars because people don't take their medications correctly.
(29:41):
That was mind blowing to me, didn't you have the
didn't you dig up the stat there the estimate that
between one hundred and three hundred billion dollars have been
attributed to this. Yeah, yeah, that's that's just in the
US specifically, and you're talking about a privatized healthcare system.
But still that represents three to ten percent of the
(30:02):
total United States healthcare costs. So what are the top
reasons that people don't take the medicine they're prescribed. Well,
according to this one academic paper that was referencing several
different I Guess polls, number one is forgetfulness. Number two
(30:24):
is side effects or perceived side effects. Number three is
high drug costs, Like it costs way too much for
me to take all these pills. I'm gonna, you know,
I'm going to separate it out a little more than
what's prescribed, and that statistic is probably going to increase
in the US. Oh absolutely. And then number four was
just that the drug does little to nothing to actually
(30:45):
affect what I'm going through? Is that a self report
on the patient's part. These are all self reports. Yeah,
this is what patients say about why they're not taking
their medications. So maybe just to be completely clear with everyone.
Maybe maybe we should say the patient believes the drug
(31:05):
does little Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, that is all. Yeah,
patient belief all that stuff. The patient believes the drug
cost is too high according to their budget. The patient
believes the side effects are happening to them, you know,
according to them. You know, it seems strange, doesn't it,
Because while we know that there are multiple cases of
(31:32):
terrible situations happening when people are overprescribed. You know, when
someone takes a drug for a condition a but it
produces a side effect and they have to take a
drug for that side effect, and then have to take
another drug for that side effect. With this giant cocktail
of drugs are taking inside effects. And although we know
that happens, in my case, I feel like if I
(31:56):
already went I don't want to sound too Larry David
about us, but like if I already had to take
some time off from work and I had to go
to a doctor's office and I might have had to
pay to park, it was this whole thing, you know,
and uh, and then they prescribe some sort of medication
for cold or whatever. I'm going to trust them and
(32:17):
I'm gonna probably take it unless it's something really weird.
You know. All right, we're gonna we're gonna do the
first ever episode of Honesty Corner with Maddie Fred And
here it goes. I have a bad back. I've had
it for a long time. I just have back pains.
It works fine, it does everything I need it to do.
(32:37):
I can still lift heavy stuff. But man, does it hurt.
It's the only bad thing about you. By the way,
I'll stop it. Well, well, I've been to several physicians
and talked about this, finding ways to help me. And
I was once prescribed this drug called Soma, which is
a muscle relaxer, and I was told to take it
(33:00):
and then come back and see them and see if
anything happened. But I chose not to after researching the
drug and its side effects and what it does to you.
But you know that in this case, it was a
physician trying to give me a medication that would make
me feel better for my ailment. But I, as the patient,
chose not to. And I wonder, I wonder, Oh gosh,
(33:21):
I just contributed to the several billion dollars Oh yeah,
healthcare costs. That's on you now. So it's true, though
there are. There are these honest concerns, and they come
from a very valid place, right. And it's not only
is it very difficult and ill informed to call one
(33:47):
group of people in this argument the bad guys quote
unquote and another group the good guys. It's also unethical
because there are situations where okay, just a little bit
of a weird comparison, if you're cool with it. Matt. So,
I've always thought that your body, you listening to this
(34:12):
specifically you, your body is a lot like a car.
And you know, if you own a car for a while,
you are probably and you drive it every day. You
might not be a mechanic, but you know your particular
car very very well, definitely, and you know when you
know second gear slips a little, You know that you
(34:35):
might have to give it a little extra gas on
a cold day, and when to check the tires, and
that one door doesn't quite line up, but you remember
what you know that you hit something in that parking
lot or whatever. You know your car. And the thing is,
in many ways, even if you are not a mechanic,
even if you are not a doctor, your body is
(34:57):
going to be the body you know the best. The
are you know the best because you only get out
of it once when you die. Yeah. Well, okay, okay, okay,
you're right, and I'm glad you said that. All right,
So some people will tell you you can sneak out
of your car occasionally, Yeah, right, like circumstances. Yes, yeah, well,
(35:22):
I think it's I think the concept of remote viewing
or accidental astral travel as an experience, a subjective experience.
I think it's way more common, and it's often reported.
And in fact, if I recall, we did a couple
episodes on this, or we did aspects of it. Anyway,
you know, you're the car that you only get out
(35:45):
of permanently once. Yes, and with the advancement of technology,
perhaps we'll be able to just jump cars whenever we
feel like it, or get a flying car. Oh yeah,
you want to ride this? Compare the sunset. So before
we take the body as car analogy on on our
(36:06):
long road trip, we should talk about the opponents here.
I mean, we just did that extended comparison to say,
in defense of people who have decided that they are
not going to take a particular medication, because you know,
(36:26):
they have any number of valid reasons, one might be
that they have an incurable condition that they would rather
live with than suffer from the side effects of the
medication they're supposed to be taking. Right, And it goes
back to their perception of their own quality of life.
(36:48):
But again they are not They are not medical professionals
often right. But now that we've established that, we should
look at the opponents of this um of this emerging technology,
specifically of digital medicine in general. Right. You know, one
(37:09):
of the one of the biggest issues I've seen is
that the amount of money that this would save and
the benefit I guess benefit to cost ratio and all
the varying ways this will cost us as humans and
you know, as a private company selling a technology as well,
it doesn't balance out. Like they don't think this is
(37:31):
the solution to get people patients to take their medicine.
Just by having the ability to track the medication doesn't
mean that the person is going to take it. It'll
mean it'll help the physician know if they get access
to the information that the patient's not taking their medicine. Oh,
I see, because for right now it's opt in on
(37:51):
the part of the patient. It's opt in, and it's
you know, and then it will turn into opt out,
and then years from now, maybe even before your son
is in his twenties, it's going to Yeah, it's going
to be strange if it doesn't have some if a
medicine doesn't have some sort of tracer, Yeah, it's possible.
(38:13):
It's it's quite possible. At this point, opponents do argue
that this is another case of the erosion of privacy,
and one of the big sticking points is going to
be familiar to a lot of people in any medicine
related field. One of the big sticking points is the
(38:35):
sale of your the most personal of your personal information
to third parties. These could be advertisers, These could be
insurance companies, These could be employers, These could be banks. Yeah,
that's another good call. This could be these could be
any number of people, and unless laws change, you will
(38:59):
never know until maybe your maybe your bank turns down alone,
or maybe you suddenly get a higher interest rate, or
a number of things that would be seemingly inexplicable or
out of the blue begin to occur to you, and
then you have to sort of be like what's his name,
(39:21):
Guy Pearson Memento and work backwards and just put the
pieces together to figure out what happened, who sold this
and why. And again, unless the laws change, you will
also not be given a cut of what they sell.
And we do want to be clear right now, right now,
(39:43):
the party line is that this information is going to
be somehow anonymous, right, and it's just it's just to
aggregate data set to build better predictions see general trends.
I think it goes a little further than that, Ben,
I think it's a system that we set up to
(40:04):
where only your phone is going to get the information
unless you send it out to anybody else. So I
guess it would be kind of like I'm trying to
find an analogy for this, but taking a picture. Every
time you take one of these pills, it's like taking
a picture, and unless you decide to send it to
you know, your doctor or your friends, nobody is going
(40:24):
to know about it unless they hack your phone, I guess,
is the way I'm imagining it, or the server of
the company Proteus that's making the software, right, That's that's
the question, you know, And that's that's the concern. Whether
it's a government or whether it's a private entity, the
question remains the same. Who watches the watchers, right, who
(40:48):
holds the powerful accountable? And this may seem like a
little bit of alarmism. Perhaps this may seem like a
little bit of a doom and gloom for something that
is inarguably a good thing, right, especially according to the proponents,
(41:09):
because the you know, it goes back to the idea
that this could save lives. And we know that continual
monitoring has already existed, right for anybody with a fitbit
or some sort of app on your phone that tells
you to quit smoking, or to count your calories or
(41:30):
to make sure that you take a minimum of ten
thousand steps a day, we know that this stuff already exists.
This is a step to put it inside you, and
right now it's a simple check in system. Right. It's so,
for instance, right now, there is nothing to stop someone
if they for some reason said, you know what, I'm
going to take six of these pills because woo whatever,
(41:53):
I'm going to share with my doctor and they need
to know that, you know, I'm taking them this way,
there's nothing physically stopping it, you know what I mean, Like,
there's not a mechanism to prevent the release maybe of
the sure Yeah, like what if what if this sort
of technology became mandatory and not opt in and was
(42:18):
applied to legally prescribed opiates, right, which you're interesting, very
dangerous and addictive substances. So then you would be in
a situation, especially if you had a past history of abuse,
where you would be monitored to make sure that not
only did you take it at whatever pill you're prescribed,
(42:40):
that three PM or something, but that you only take
it then, yeah, and that you don't take two or
three or whatever. And then also to make sure that
that ping happens every number of times one per pill, right,
so that they know you're not selling it on the
black market. Yeah. You see, what starts as a very
(43:03):
little helpful thing does indeed have wide reaching implications. Oh yeah,
I've got two examples right here. So if each one
has a specific let's say MAC address and it's not
MAC address, but each one has a specific serial number
or something each pill, sure, then you will know if
someone sells their pills and to whom sells those pills.
If you are tracking the ingestion of these, that could
(43:27):
get really interesting in the future. And another thing was overdoses.
You if you could find a way to control the
release mechanism. You could prevent overdosing of practically anything that
isn't injectable. Yeah, and like that's the silver lining. I'm
saying totally because for proponents of this trend, make no mistake,
(43:49):
it is a trend. This is not the last you're
going to hear about this technology. In For proponents of this,
that just seems like another good thing, another tick in
the box of pros because you're saying, oh, we could
stop drug dealers. Yeah, we could maybe combat at some
(44:10):
level what are they called pill mills. Yeah, it's tough
for me to say that because different accents I have
come out. Yeah, So of course I just have to
say at that point, if you want to, I'm telling
people how to mark itself for it, but you would
just depending on what the pills made out of. I'm
assuming it can't be indestructible because you have to process
(44:32):
it through your body. Sure, but you just get the
pills and then break them up and then you know,
leave out the sensors. Oh, I see change the method
of delivery. Just saying there, but I think that's a
problem that humanity a lot of times forgets when we're
trying to solve these huge problems when you're trying to
deal especially with substance abuse of any kind. Mankind is
(44:57):
very inventive. Sure, and we'll find a way. I mean,
that's just all right, but you you owe it to everybody, Paul,
and I include it to do a gold bloom version
in that one, a gold bloom version of that one
of that line. I don't know if I have a
gold bloom. I don't think I can do it. Yeah,
you can gold blooms like life that finds a way
(45:22):
or something. I think it's worth about the cadence that
could you do that one? That was it? That was it?
Swinging a miss all right? Left pretty hard on that.
I enjoyed it a lot. That's very kind. You're a
very kind person. So there's another thing we could say
here too, Matt. It's the question would be, so we're
talking about changing the means of delivery or we're talking
(45:43):
about somehow removing the sensor. Right, Another option, at least
in this case this very into the Bilify, would be
to remove the patch. Yes, because the patch is the
means of transmission for the app on the phone and
later the web portal. That might work. However, this variant
(46:06):
of abilify is only one instance of a larger sea
change or medical advancement. Right that is probably past the
point of no return at this time. So what else
is out there? We'll tell you after a word from
our sponsor. Okay, so let's say, hypothetically, Matt, you said
(46:32):
you don't know me, you can't run my business. I'll
take the drugs I want what I want them. May Man,
you don't know me. I'm gonna take drugs I want
on my time and my schedule. All right, Yeah, that's good.
I didn't want I was going soft on a Southern
accent there because I didn't want to offend you. But
(46:52):
I think he nailed it, you know. Just it lives
inside me and sometimes it escapes. That's how I feel
about some things. Yeah, moving on, there's no need to
get get into those sorts of episodes yet. We'll wait
until next Halloween. Maybe. So you're telling me you left
me on a cliffhanger here. It's true. You said before
(47:15):
we went to the break that there are other people
making digital drugs. Oh yes, yes, of course. A Florida
company named detect Rx is making another sort of sensor
ingestable sensor. Their's is called the id cap and as
we record this, it has already been tested or it's
(47:36):
being tested on a number of different drugs, including opioids
and HIV medication. Here's all it works. It's made of
magnesium and silver chloride, and it's encapsulated with pills and
you don't need a patch because the entire time it's
inside the body, as it's being ingested, it generates a
(47:58):
low power radio signal that can be picked up by
a little antenna if it's near you. What yep, And
that's that's according to Harry Travis, the president of detect
our X. They are currently seeking FDA clearance for this
application in twenty eighteen. And of course FDA applications are
(48:20):
notoriously difficult unless you know the right people and uh,
you know, have the right political connections. Hold on a second, Yeah,
I just thought of something. With these new digital pills,
does that mean we will all be pooping out tiny
little sensors every time we go to the bathroom. I
(48:43):
mean that's the dream, right, Like especially I'm kidding, I'm kidding, kid,
that's not the dream, But especially if you're taking multiple medications,
each of them having a sensor, your bowel movement is
going to be twenty percent metal and micro electronics twenty percent. Well,
I mean depending because you're talking about a twenty four
(49:05):
hour period anyway, all right, Well, I'm just saying we're
pooping a lot of metal stuff out. So this might
sound comedic of us, and to a degree it is. Right,
we're talking about poop. Yeah, the future of weird defication's
that's something that concerns a lot of people. And I
think we earned that joke because we talked about fecal
matter transplants once years ago, and we both kept like
(49:27):
a straight street lay serious tone the whole way through. Seriously,
I don't even think we mentioned pooping back and forth
forever we have now. But even even though it does
feel comedic to a degree, it is. What we're seeing
is that every time there's a medical advancement, there are
(49:50):
inherently going to be ripple effects, many of which not all,
but many of which are going to be unpredictable, right,
and some of which may be very dang interests. Now,
back when it took us as a species three hundred
years to figure out things that seem simple today, we
had a little bit more buffer time. Collectively, we had
(50:12):
a little bit more of a of a margin in
which to experience these implications and these ripple effects as
they rolled out. But now with this increasing frequency of
medical advancements, which again barring an asteroid at gamma ray
burst a coronal mass ejection, then unless something destroys civilization
(50:36):
as we understand it, this pace is going to continue increasing,
and there are going to be smaller and smaller windows
of time to analyze, address, and if necessary, mitigate these
ripple effects. We are right now on the bleeding edge
(50:59):
of not only the future of medicine but also the
future of monitoring. Yes, absolutely, and I for one have
played entirely too many video games to be okay with this.
Looking at you, Dass specifically, looking at you, I completely
(51:19):
understand the goals set out by the healthcare industry reduce
cost and get patients to take their medicines so we
can actually help people. But and I would argue that
the cost is probably the most important thing for the
healthcare industry, at least in the United States. But I'm
not sure that trackable medicine really is the answer. And
I do agree with you Ben, like this is a
(51:40):
good stepping point in you know, the way we're going
to get to the better future, the better medicine. It's
you can definitely see the linkage there to how it
can help. But right now, I guess you just have
to take that step in order to get there. I
think you do. Yeah, you have to, right, Okay, But
it's bothers me because it feels like it's something ripped
(52:02):
out of the science fiction novel or again in data
sex that I don't want to be a part of
what happened in that's just where humans and are becoming
androids and replacing different parts of their body and upgrading
and humanity, the state of humanity is really looked into.
You're not gonna do that. You're not gonna take some
cyber implants. I you know, I haven't decided yet. Philosophically,
(52:24):
I think it's if I could just take my brain,
my neural like if you could map my brain out
and then send that as a piece of software into
a robot. I'm okay with that, I think really, because
I feel like I could live forever, but having pieces
of metal integrated into my body, I don't know. I
wonder if Paul would like get electric eyes or something.
(52:48):
He's he's saying, maybe he's giving a probably not shrug. Yeah,
he's pointing to his chest and saying pacemaker. Oh okay,
see you're saying that pacemakers already exist. So this is
to some extent already happening. Wow, we're like miming to
each other through this is great. Well, off air, Paul did,
Paul did chime in, and we'd love you to chime
(53:11):
in on air sometime. We'll see if we can convince
him in a future episode. Don't let them see behind
the curtain. Well, let us know if you want to
hear what Paul sounds like, and if he is amenable
to it, we will. We will see, we will see
for sure. But right now, we are not fans of
things being mandatory. We think that people should have agency
(53:32):
and the ability to make their own decisions. And it
is true. Look, it is true. This is not an
inherently evil thing. Yes, it just has implications. Not to
sound too much like Dennis the implication on Always Sunny
in Philadelphia, but yes, yes, it is true. And I
just want to list something that would be a very
(53:53):
good aspect of this. Imagine, if we're talking about an
elderly patient who maybe has memory problems right, and then
has a regiment of multiple drugs that they must take.
This could save their lives. Yeah, this could easily, without
a doubt, save their lives and maybe increase the quality
(54:14):
of their life at the same time. But it still
doesn't address the larger question, which is at what price
progress We have established the frequency of significant medical advances
is increasing and you know, un balanced. Overall, this looks
to be a wonderful phenomenon. It has the potential to
(54:37):
save lives, which is what medicine is supposed to be about,
saving lives and increasing the quality of those lives until
everybody finally hops out of their cars. Diseases that once
ravaged entire communities can now be fixed with something as
simple as a once a day pill schedule or a
shot in the arm. But the problem is that with
(54:59):
this still or progress in the field of medicine, we
do not see the same amount of progress, the same
increasing advances, or the frequency of advances in the halls
of government, right the people making the laws are still
moving at the same pace. We don't see it in
the field of bioethics or academia and philosophy. There are
(55:20):
people who are tackling these problems conceptually right and in
an applied manner, But the medicine is evolving faster than
the social constructs that we have to address it or
to handle it in the best possible way. And we
want to hear from you. Are you for this? Are
(55:41):
you against it? Do you think, on balance it's better
for this to exist or do you think it could
be misused abused somehow and if so in what way? Yeah?
Do you think it could benefit your life in some
way to be able to track the medications you take?
Or are you nervous about metal in your poop? I mean, honestly,
I am. We didn't we didn't prove that though. Yeah,
(56:05):
I know, maybe the sensors are made out of something else,
something biological that breaks down. I didn't see anything about
that in the messaging from the website, but you know,
perhaps so we want to hear from you. This is
typically the time where we would do shout out corner, however,
(56:25):
as we are missing our third a half where we're
going to hold because this letter that we were going
to read is a very meaningful one, and I think
we may have teased in a previous episode, Yes, solving
some of the mysteries of Georgia Guidestone, so we will
wait until we are voltrons together. Captain planted it up
(56:48):
in full force for that letter M for our shout
out corner. In the meantime, you can find us on Instagram,
you can find us on Facebook, you can find us
on Twitter, and you can write to us on all
of those avenues with suggestions for stories, with reactions, with
stuff that you think your fellow listeners would be interested
(57:10):
in hearing. It's really simple conspiracy at how Stuff Works
dot com. And that's the end of this classic episode.
(57:37):
If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode,
you can get into contact with us in a number
of different ways. One of the best is to give
us a call. Our number is one eight three three
stdwy t K. If you don't want to do that,
you can send us a good old fashioned email. We
are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff they Don't Want
(57:59):
You to Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Show Links
RSSStoreAboutLive ShowsPopular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.