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11/14/17: BIOMEDICAL BIG BROTHER

Ron Patton | November 14, 2017

BIOMEDICAL BIG BROTHER

MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS

When I bury myself in my daily studies, sometimes I stumble on to a story that is so unbelievable, I spend the whole day finding out everything I need to know about it. Even after reading so many different views on it, you have to try to uncover it in terms that the average person can understand.

Sometimes I am forced to use fictional metaphors in order to explain a new reality, no matter how bizarre it may sound.

One of the most pertinent and relevant depictions of the social consequences of contemporary technology is the rule breaking television show, Black Mirror. Besides the obvious Netflix binge watching of Stranger Things, Black Mirror should be watched by ever Ground Zero listener because it is a latter day technological extension of Rod Sterling’s Twilight Zone, with little sprinkles of George Orwell’s dystopia thrown into the mix like salt.

Orwell’s 1984 is surely one of the best known novels, referred to whenever one wants to illustrate a totalitarian state. It is a precautionary tale of terror, surveillance, and a repressive bureaucracy to exert total power over the individual.

Black Mirror snaps an unbelievably unflattering photo of our not too distant future where the technological Big Brother System has advanced to the point of banality, leaving everyone caught in its trance, adapting to a dystopia that is occluded by electronic fog.

Humanity’s fear of machines has plagued us since the invention of technology. However, now in contrast, we are a society dependent on our smart phones and other tech. It seems like a given reality that eventually everyone will not see a problem with being micro-chipped in order to participate in the monolithic transhumant world that awaits us.

The terrifying part is that while full-on technological slavery is arguably years away, some of the technological dystopian nightmare feels like it is five minutes away especially when it comes to new technology and your physical well-being.

In my recall of George Orwell’s book, 1984, I don’t believe that he actually addressed how medical affairs would be handled by the party. We know that most if any rebellion was seen as mental deficiency and was treated accordingly but Orwellian medicine is a term that I don’t believe anyone has used in reference to the book, although Orwell’s bad health affected the novel.

In 1938, Orwell went to a sanatorium because he was coughing up blood. He was eventually diagnosed with tuberculosis. Treatment consisted of simple bed rest and good nutrition, and he was discharged several months later.

Eight years later, depressed by his wife’s death, Orwell moved to a windy and damp Scottish island. His health worsened significantly just as he was working on the first draft of “1984.”

Fever, weight loss, and night sweats sent him to the hospital, where he underwent “collapse therapy,” a treatment designed to close the dangerous cavities that form in the chests of tuberculosis patients.

Some say that it was Orwell’s sense of human suffering that made his writing more universal.

There’s plenty of evidence for “embodied cognition”, or the idea that how our feels influences how we think.

Unfortunately, we flatter ourselves into thinking that our basic ethical principles, political convictions and religious beliefs emerge from calm reflection, but they really don’t.

None of us, in the end, can be sure our views aren’t heavily influenced by random factors. The brain is influenced by thousands of unconscious factors that predispose us to make certain choices ahead of time, even if we think we made them ourselves.

Brain imaging can already pull bits of information from the minds of willing volunteers in laboratories. What happens when police or lawyers want to use it to pry a key fact from the mind of an unwilling person?

Will your brain be protected under the Fourth Amendment from unreasonable search and seizure?

Or will your brain have a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination?

We won’t need to wait for lie detector test results before brain decoding is capable of extracting information an investigator might want, such as the encryption code to a file or the combination to a safe.

In the past two decades, neuroscience research has made rapid gains in deciphering how the human brain works, building toward a fuller comprehension of behavior that could vastly change how society goes about educating children, conducting business, and treating diseases. Powerful neuroimaging techniques are for the first time able to reveal which parts of the living human brain are in action while the mind experiences fear, pain, empathy, and even feelings of religious belief.

Forcing someone to undergo a brain scan, the way a person might now be ordered to provide a urine sample or a DNA swab, appears to be edging closer to reality, even if the scan method were so non-invasive that some might argue it isn’t a search at all, some may say that it is as legal as dusting for a fingerprint.

But this is a fingerprint of your mind, your thought, your core, maybe even your soul.

The brain science revolution raises the tantalizing sci-fi–like prospect that secrets hidden inside people’s heads, like prejudice, intention to commit a crime, or deception, are within reach of being knowable. And such “mind reading” could have wide-ranging legal ramifications.

Now, mind you this advanced science is not here quite yet, but another innovation in Orwellian medicine has just been approved for use.

For the first time, the Food and Drug Administration has approved a digital pill — a medication embedded with a sensor that can tell doctors whether, and when, patients take their medicine.

The approval marks a significant advance in the growing field of digital devices designed to monitor medicine-taking and to address the expensive, longstanding problem that millions of patients do not take drugs as prescribed.

Experts estimate that so-called non-adherence or noncompliance to medication costs about $100 billion a year, much of it because patients get sicker and need additional treatment or hospitalization.

Patients who agree to take the digital medication, a version of the antipsychotic Abilify, can sign consent forms allowing their doctors and up to four other people, including family members, to receive electronic data showing the date and time pills are ingested.

A smartphone app will let them block recipients anytime they change their mind.

Although voluntary, the technology is still likely to prompt questions about privacy and whether patients might feel pressure to take medication in a form their doctors can monitor.

Of course, it is being marketed as a way to help patients take their medications on time or as directed – it can also be used to spy on people who are already being targeted by the DEA and that is opioid users.

In the past doctors have been pressured into assuming that all of their patients that complain of pain are opioid drug seekers. If you have been subjected to urine tests, pain agreements, interrogation and impromptu “pill counts” where you are asked to bring in your bottle to the office, and then you will know that you along other patients are suspected of abusing or selling their medications.

It is because some doctors are afraid of an audit where officials have threatened to take practices away if the doctors don’t do as they are told.

As prescription drug abuse has risen, the DEA has come under increasing pressure from Congress to show it is containing the problem. A report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office said the DEA had not shown its strategy was working and called for clearer performance measures.

Their solution was to employ the very same methods used to track and spy on so-called terrorists.

This raises the real issue of government over-reach and whether or not you can safely be treated without the threat of being flagged, tracked or interrogated by the DEA.

The digital pill that has been approved for use has an embedded sensor to track to see if patients are taking their medication properly.

The question is, if your doctor requires you to take the pill, would you?

Right now, the pill has been especially set aside for patients with diagnosed mental illness.

The medicine is a version of Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd’s established drug, Abilify for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression, containing a tracking device developed by Proteus Digital Health.

The system offers doctors an objective way to measure if patients are swallowing their pills on schedule, opening up a new avenue for monitoring medicine compliance that could be applied in other therapeutic areas.

The FDA said that being able to track ingestion of medicines prescribed for mental illness may be useful “for some patients”, although the ability of the digital pill to improve patient compliance had not been proved.

The system works by sending a message from the pill’s sensor to a wearable patch, which then transmits the information to a mobile application so that patients can track the ingestion of the medication on their smartphone.

About the size of a grain of salt, the sensor has no battery or antenna and is activated when it gets wet from stomach juices.

That completes a circuit between coatings of copper and magnesium on either side, generating a tiny electric charge. In the longer term, such digital pills could also be used to manage patients with other complicated medicine routines, such as those suffering from diabetes or heart conditions.

Poor compliance with drug regimens is a common problem in many disease areas, especially when patients suffer from chronic conditions.

However, Orwellian medicine does not stop with tracking pills.

Big Brother is ready to watch you as you hop from doctor to doctor, treatment to treatment, and you have reason to be paranoid about it.

Congress has moved us one step closer to establishing a unique patient identifier (UPI) system. The UPI is meant to act like a passport into the healthcare system and to aid healthcare institutions in matching patients with their medical records.

A unique number assigned to every American that gives access to that person’s full medical records to every doctor, hospital, researcher, and public health department in the country.

If this sounds ominous to you, you’re not alone. This all started with the passage of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA, which required Health and Human Services (HHS) to issue every citizen a UPI.

The Act, which allegedly protected patient privacy, actually gave legal access to your records without your knowledge to an estimated 800,000 parties. After a public outcry, Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) added language to a spending bill in 1998 prohibiting federal funds from being used to develop UPIs. This language has prevented the development of UPI, until now.

Now, President Trump has signed a bill that makes federal funds available to aid the private sector in developing a “patient-matching strategy.”

The public has demonstrated strong opposition to UPI. Polling has showed that 88% of Americans oppose requiring all patient medical records to be stored in a national computerized database over their lifetime; 78% said that it is very important that no one have access to their medical information without their permission. This desire for privacy is severely undermined now that Rep. Paul’s prohibition has been eliminated.

It would be hard to enumerate all the possibilities for abuse and discrimination with UPI. Medical records can include demographic data, genetic information, family histories, treatments, personal comments, hospitalizations, and lifestyle information. Putting all of this in one place makes it ripe for identity thieves and other criminals—a trend that is already skyrocketing with electronic health records. It could give the government an opportunity to coerce individuals into getting all the CDC-recommended vaccines.

Moreover, it could make it more difficult to avoid being an involuntary research subject.

The bottom line is that a person’s medical information is among the most sensitive information there is, and is meant only for that patient and his or her doctor.

With great scientific advancement comes great responsibility. Like any new technology, it runs the risk of being abused.

We think we’re getting smarter, and we are indeed exposed to more information than ever before in history, but we’re still the same species that we’ve been for dozens-to-hundreds of millennia. This makes us fall prey to the same sorts of logical fallacies and cognitive biases of the human condition that we’ve fallen too many times in the past.

Written by Ron Patton




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