It actually already exists (minus the black market part). My friend is an RN an she and most of her co-workers use it in their clinic every day. I forget what the app's name is though.
38 karma · joined July 4, 2013
I've been thinking a lot about how I we all get health care. A year ago, I nearly vanished from my doctor's private practice because I had an intuitive feeling that expensive, highly specialized care without a single payer insurance system was a backdoor to endless health care debt nation wide. Now, as the dust settles from our collective experiences, I know this to be true.
So I'm revisiting some of my older habits. I'm using WebMD to diagnose my own problems. I've enrolled in an EMT course to learn basic triage and treatment. I've installed an app that automatically notifies me of any possible drug interactions between the various medications I buy off the black market for myself. Last week I thought I might have sepsis, but I dropped into an off-the-books IRC chatroom and found out I didn't; it was just a bruise that looked funny. If you want to send me Bitcoins, I'll take them.
I continue to try to find ways to diagnose myself over the web. I learn new tools every day. And every tool I have, that's another step towards freedom from the corporate controlled health care system. I'm convinced that if other people don't teach themselves how to be their own doctors, then they're just pawns with their own lives and careers who obviously have too little spare time on their hands. Distributed peer to peer medicine is a must. Evolve beyond the reach of the insurance companies that want to bankrupt you. I'm doing just that.
Distributed everything is where we're going.
The way I see it, if you're still on centralized health care networks, you're part of the problem. You can't stick your fingers in your ears anymore and scream 'lalallalal'. All of your information is being recorded, forever, and it's all going to end up on an itemized bill that you can't pay because your insurance is inadequate and our country doesn't value primary care.
I'm running more and more under the pseudonym of Ven Portman. I don't really know why, since I just published that fact on my own public website. I believe that everyone should learn to be a specialist in their spare time in order to temporarily evade the abuses of corporations and governments. I somehow believe that normal people have time to learn these things and blame them if they don't. I avoid grappling with a broad conversation about corporate and government corruption and abuse in the field in which I dabble because clinging to my dilettante skill set is the only way I can retain some illusion of agency in a world which is increasingly unjust and beyond my control. Anyone who doesn't do what I do and devote all of their spare time to learning basic medicine to help build our distributed health care system of the future is just part of the problem.
The centralized health care system you know is dying. We're scattering to back alley healthcare everywhere. If you're a normal person with a family and their own field of expertise who doesn't have time to take an EMT course and learn how to intubate an unconscious blunt force trauma victim, well then fuck you. You're all sheeple anyway.
–Ev Bogue July 4 2013 undisclosed location