It feels like making smart money decisions has only become more difficult in the current economic environment, right? It's hard to know how to respond in an era of inflation or federal rate hikes and just the stock market volatility that we're all experiencing. And that's why our show, How To Money, exists. We want to help you to make confident and informed decisions in these uncertain times.
We're two best buds covering practical topics like buying vs renting, saving money at the grocery store, maximizing your income potential, and ways to battle money and anxiety. So if you're looking for help in navigating the world of financial uncertainty, check out our show. You can listen to How To Money on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
我们是两个最好的朋友,讨论实用的话题,如买房还是租房、在杂货店省钱、最大化你的收入潜力以及应对金钱和焦虑的方法。因此,如果你正在寻求在金融不确定性的世界中获得帮助,请关注我们的节目。你可以在 I Heart Radio 应用程序、苹果播客或任何你获得播客的地方收听《如何赚钱》。
Hi, I'm David Eagleman. I have a new podcast called Inner Cosmos on I Heart. I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions like, can we create new senses for humans? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception, and your reality. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
你们好,我是David Eagleman。我制作了一档新的播客节目,名为 Inner Cosmos,在 I Heart 平台上播出。我将探索我们大脑和经历之间的关系,提出一些不寻常的问题,例如我们能否为人类创造新的感官呢?欢迎你每周加入我的节目,一起发现你的大脑如何掌控你的行为、感知和现实。你可以在 I Heart Radio 应用程序、苹果播客或其他任何你获得播客的地方收听 David Eagleman 的 Inner Cosmos。
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All right, fellow conspiracy realists, we're bringing this classic to your attention because unfortunately, it got a little bit prescient, a little bit predictive. Do 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. Like, he wants to know what pills I'm taking. What's it do? Everything. He wants to know when you poop. No. He's there. 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 we called it, which is all about medical monitoring, right?
And this came out in 2018. And there's been a lot of progress. A lot of people own fit bits. A lot of people own medical monitoring devices. And the question is, is this a life saving breakthrough or is this another avenue to off control? Or is it 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, 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 it even a weirder one than that. I was at downtown Disney or whatever it's called now in Orlando. And I went to a uni-clow, just like a Japanese clothing brand or whatever. And you take your stuff, put it in a bucket on the cash register, check out thing, and it knows what's in there. I don't know if it's like RFID chips or what.
But it's. This episode, this episode, alright. From UFOs to psychic powers and 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 is Matt. And our compete group, Noel, 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 Deckant, you or you, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
Another person who works here is named Christopher Haseyotis. He's on the research team at Stuff Media, I guess, How Stuff Works Stuff Media. And he sent us something that we. He sent it to us yesterday, you think, or maybe the day before. And Ben and Nolan and I all just went, oh, this is an episode that we are producing right now. And we can't wait to get you into it, but we're not going to spoil it.
The first thing we're going to do is just talk about health. Yes, health, medicine. What does it mean? Yes, panesias do they exist, what is the cure for what all ails you.
I do want to say if you would like to hear 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 by tuning into an excellent show that Lauren Vogelbaum produced called How Stuff Works Now. And it's sort of a cavalcade, a very interesting story. So do check that out in the meantime, as Matt said, health.
Yes. And I got to tell you, I got to tell you, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. 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 closer to the brink of destabilization. The earthquake in Iran, Iraq border there, just killed 500-something thousand or 500 people. Puerto Rico also devastated by a hurricane. Killings in the United States, the Pacific region, the Pacific theater, is an inching closer and closer to a nuclear exchange.
But despite all of these horrible things, oh, 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, we as a species have it pretty good right now, especially in a medical sense.
I mean, absolutely. Can you imagine getting sick 500 years ago, even 100 years ago, getting sick to the point of needing, let's say, a surgeon? Oh, boy. Yeah, yeah, and depending on how far back in the timeline we go, 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.
So way back in the day in Western Europe, there was this concept that barbers were also inherently qualified to be surgeons, 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 medical advancements made from just 1917 to 2017, we would have to start an entirely different show. And Paul, Matt, and I would have to go somewhere and brainstorm a title that was better than all the medical advancements made from 1917 to 2017. The podcast. I don't know. 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.
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 in a different direction and ask ourselves, what will people living in 21, 17 think of the medical technology and techniques used today in our time here in good old 2017? Whoa. What? Essentially, we'll be the future of medicine.
Well, I mean, I have some ideas, but 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 at front, we know that this can be a touchy subject anytime you're talking about health. Because you're also inherently 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 advice to you. We're not trying to tell you how to think about this stuff. We're just going to 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 us and I assume Paul does as well. No, okay. All right. Okay. Don't go to Paul if you're choking. No, it's cool because we hang out outside of work. And so if you happen to see us in person, we can reset your disjointed or dislocated arm or make a splint for you or something. But yeah, we are not giving anyone medical advice. Yeah. And if you have a compound fracture, don't call me.
Okay. You know, go to bed with compound fractures. Yeah. All right. So we've 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 and we don't do it again. Well, in theory.
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 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 Godleib notes, and we've got a quote here, the pace at which fundamental discoveries of basic science are being uncovered is accelerating as is the speed at which medical practice is being transformed by these inventions. Metamorphic changes, Gottleib 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, saying that does have sort of a buzz feedie headline to it, but it is true.
In the past, you know, the first question is, well, what gives? What made us such plotting Peters? Yeah. Well, our stumbling Stevens earlier. Yeah. I'm just making up names. The plotting stumbling, Peter Stevens 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 or for something. Right.
Yeah. We've mentioned this in past episodes. Long time listeners are probably familiar with this concept and Matt's spot on. Well, we say cost of communication, we don't necessarily mean how much did it, how much of 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 Xfinity account costs. Right. Right. It is, as Matt said, time and materials and time is the primary factor here.
So not only could people not learn about a treatment on the internet, which is its whole other, whole other saccacats, but 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 easily and effectively, 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 what's wrong with me. 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, they're across the world and their 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 someone who takes a ship, let's say, across from Italy to Britain and spend some time in London or something.
所以,它几乎是在孤立中发展的,直到有人从意大利乘船到英国,在伦敦之类的地方停留了一段时间。
Right. Or some sort of MS area 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 of the time. For instance, the idea that consuming citrus fruits were impossible along maritime voyage will combat scurvy.
Right? Yeah. And 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 neither here nor there. The important part is just as you said, Matt, which is that these things are developing in isolation and the pace of communication did exist, but it was glacial compared to what we have today.
Physicians might also, must be said, be bound by spiritual or religious explanations for the environment, you did not get the plague because of a bite from a flea that was carried by a rat. You got the plague because you ate meat on Friday and are there for ungodly because you could have bought an indulgence or a dispensation, but you didn't. So for the sin of not participating in extortion, you have the plague.
But we put in a disclaimer here. 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 or religious explanations for an ailment, which you know, in some cases exist today. It's historical.
People are as a species. We are explainers. We are classifiers. We seek to understand the inexplicable 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, an ideological is probably a better word than spiritual or religious at this time.
Aside from that, 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 allow people to live way longer span of time. As we know, and as 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 to an extreme degree.
Oh, side note mat. I feel like you already know this one. So stop me if you've heard it. Do you remember? Do you know why the madhatter is now in Wonderland? Do you know the story of madhatters?
Like how we got there? No, no, no, just the phrase madhatter. I do not. So when these habitatshers would create or form hats, again, historically, they would use chemicals like mercury to assist in solidifying the shape. Stiffening it? Right. And what happened is that over time exposure to these chemicals started affecting the mental faculties of these hat makers, these hap p er dashers. And then the phrase madhatter originated from that. It's not just a funny joke.
像我们怎样到达那里?不,不,不,只是madhatter这个词语。我不会。所以当这些制帽商人会创造或制作帽子时,历史上,他们会使用类似汞这样的化学物质来帮助固定形状。使它变硬?没错。随着时间的推移,暴露于这些化学物质中的影响开始影响这些帽子制造商,这些hap p er dashers的智力能力。然后madhatter这个词语就从此而起了。这不仅是一个有趣的笑话。
Oh, March hair, by the way, of course, being like spring reproductive madness. But the interesting thing to me is that there was some point in time where somebody, probably in Europe, looked at someone else and they were like, hey, man. I'm worried about Steve. He's been acting real weird. And then 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's a direct quote. That is a direct quote. Yeah, mustard. That's not a serious condiment. Can you imagine? We don't really believe that. Don't send us anything about mustard.
So you see the problem here, folks. You see the dilemma, the, there are multiple completely understandable reasons why the pace of medical treatment and medical breakthroughs is slow at this point 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, could you get like some sort of time travel noise? Okay, there we go. Where are we? We're in the 16th century. Okay, all right. We're in the 16th century. That's why everything looks so assassin, pretty right now.
I can hear the horses. Mm-hmm. And you can smell the smells. Mm-hmm. Right. Potent. Yes. Potent indeed, my friend. We are actually at the exact, well, the 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 gets sick, it's somehow linked to these tiny little things that we now know are microorganisms, right?
So over the next few centuries, 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.
在接下来的几个世纪里,我们将迅速穿越几个世纪,会有更多的发现为这个概念增加更多的可信度。
However, it wasn't until the 19th century that doctors or the Western ones at least even began washing their hands. What? At all. What?
然而,直到19世纪,医生们,至少是西方的医生们,才开始洗手。真的吗?不会吧!
Check it out, man. In 1847, a Hungarian physician named Ignas Philip Semmelweis proposed that maternal death, death during childbirth, could be sharply cut when obstetricians washed their hands before conducting, you know, before the recording of the dead.
Yeah, I've seen it, dude. That's right, you have. Yeah, you can't unsee that. Specifically, they recommend a chlorinated lime solution. That miracle. You can't unsee that miracle. Oh, man. You all right? Yeah, okay. I just had a flashback, but we're good.
But that's, it seems so simple. Right. Yeah, it does seem pretty simple. Here's what happened to Ignas.
但是,看起来很简单啊。对啊,确实很简单。以下是伊格纳斯发生的事情。
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 colleague's just, just ribbed him the whole time. He died in an asylum in 1865. Where he was put involuntarily. Yeah. Because he was crazy. Telling people to wash their hands all the time. How dare you tell me to wash my hands like some kind of peasant doing laundry? Get out of here Semmelweis. Go back to your room. But there was only two weeks after guards. It's just say, they beat him up. They beat him up to an inch of his life. Look, I think we should use an accurate description. Okay. And it's fine to beat me if you want. They beat the ever-living **** out of him.
In 1865, he died two weeks after this vicious beating. Only later, much later did history acknowledge his pressings. Yeah, his understanding. And, man, this guy could have saved a whole, well, he did save a whole bunch of people in a way, but ultimately he was just persecuted for it.
And Louis Pisture around somewhere at the same time confirmed the germ theory in the 1860s. And a few years after that, Joseph Lister began introducing sterile techniques into surgery. Ah, 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 we have the privilege of retrospecting now. And it is an immense and powerful privilege because the average person living in the US washes their hands multiple times a day.
Right. Thanks to Pastor. And I wonder if it's just at the time it was the implication that this physician is dirty in some way or this physician's tools are unclean.
好的,感谢牧师。我想知道这是否意味着这位医生在某种程度上不干净,或者他的工具不卫生。
Right. So it wasn't until much, much later that these original findings began to significantly impact medical practice in 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 process could be mitigated or somewhat controlled to help patients. And all in all, this took about 300 years from the 16th century to the 19th century.
And this is just one discovery. And each single one leads to other discoveries. And so as long as there aren't any kind of giant asteroids that impact your earth, there are some other catastrophe and we'll just cross our fingers that nothing's going to 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 to that communication thing now. Now that I can get on this laptop here and shoot an email off to anybody anywhere in the entire planet that has access to the internet, I mean, we can do this.
Right. So yes, okay, it's true. It took 300 years for the world to agree that doctors should wash their hands, but by way of contrast, it only took 30 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.
This is not all warm fuzzies, hugs from grandma, fresh cookies, unicorns and rainbows. Yeah, that's not even Rick Shaw's stiff drinks and lava lamps. No, sir, you see along with the increase in effectiveness, we are also as a species seen unequal access to medicine, rising costs, especially in the field 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.
我们甚至还没有谈到美国的医疗保健成本,这是另一个问题,我们不可避免地需要为此进行更新。
Pretty soon too with what's going on, but these concerns that men's talking about about privacy, they are particularly strange. Yes, long time listeners, fellow conspiracy realists, 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 deeper than that. The future of medicine you see is upon us, digital medicine. Welcome to the rabbit hole. Don't worry. We'll monitor your vitals. While this handy message from our sponsor invades your head holes.
Here's where it gets crazy. In a recent article for the New York Times dated November 13th, actually, of this year right before we recorded this podcast, a journalist named Pam Billak. Billak, 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 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 pill in question is a variant of a name-brand anti-psychotic, Abilify. Yes. And this product is approved for the treatment of schizophrenia, acute treatment of manic and mixed episodes associated with bipolar, one disorder, and for use as an add-on treatment for depression and adults.
The FDA granted the approval of Abilify MySight to a Tsukha Pharmaceutical Company Limited. In the sensor technology in the patch are made by this company called Proteus Digital Health. What's that you say? A smart pill.
美国食品药品监督管理局(FDA)已批准由古河制药有限公司生产的Abilify MySight。这个贴片传感技术是由Proteus Digital Health公司制造的。你是说什么?是一个智能药丸。
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. 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 are thinking, oh my god, my alarm's 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 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. For now. However, if you are a patient going through schizophrenia, manic and mixed episodes, bipolar disorder, serious depression, 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 Abilify, is just one more contribution to the growing wave of monitoring techniques and technologies used to address one of medicines, primary woes, which I was not fully aware of. 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 health provider. What does that mean? That means that let's say you have poison-iving. You've got poison-iving really bad. And they prescribed you a blister pack that is essentially a steroid treatment. And you have to take X number of pills the first day, Y number of pills the next day, and so on and so forth until your poison-iv 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 big issue for the healthcare industrial complex. Let's call it. So what they call it patient non-adherence to prescribe to medication. That's like the long way about it. And it's associated with all kinds of things. For outcomes for being prescribed medication that's supposed to do something, well, 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. It costs billions of dollars because people don't take their medications correctly. That was mind-blowing to me. Didn't you have the, didn't you dig up the, the stat there, the estimate that between $100 and $300 billion have been attributed to this?
Yeah. Yeah. That's just in the US specifically and you're talking about a privatized healthcare system. But still, that represents 3 to 10 percent of the total United States healthcare costs.
So what are the top reasons that people don't take the medicine there prescribed? Well, according to this one academic paper that was referencing several different, I guess, polls, number one is forgetfulness. Number two 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 going to, 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 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 medication.
So maybe just to be completely clear with everyone, maybe we should say the patient believes the drug does little.
也许为了让大家完全明白,我们应该说患者认为这种药没什么作用。
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, patient belief, all that stuff. The patient believes the drug costs 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 terrible situations happening when people are over prescribed, you know, and 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. You know, with this giant cocktail of drugs you're taking inside of it. And although we know that happens in my case, I feel like if I already went, I don't want to sound too Larry David about this, 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 then they prescribe some sort of medication for cold or whatever. I'm going to trust them and I'm going to probably take it unless it's something really weird, you know.
All right, we're going to 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 pain. It works fine. It does everything I need it to do. I can still lift heavy stuff, but man, does it hurt? It's the only bad thing about you, by the way.
Well, well, I've, you know, 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 and then come back and see them and see if anything happened. 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, I just contributed to the several billion dollars. Oh, yeah. Healthcare costs. That's on you now.
And so it's true though, 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 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 with it, Matt. So I've always thought that your body, you listening to this specifically, 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 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 going to be the body you know the best, the car you know the best because you only get out of it once when you die. Yeah.
Well, well, okay, okay, okay. You're right. And I'm glad you said that.
嗯,嗯,好,好,好。你是对的。而且我很高兴你这么说。
All right. So some people will tell you you can sneak out of your car occasionally. Yeah.
好的。有些人会告诉你,偶尔可以悄悄离开你的汽车。是的。
Right? Or do you circumstances? Yes.
对吗?或者你的情况不一样吗?是的。
Yeah. Well, 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 than it's often reported. And in fact, if I recall, we did a couple episodes on this or aspects of it. Anyway, you know, you're the car that you only get out 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.
是的。随着技术的进步,也许我们可以随时随地跳车,甚至开飞车。哦,是啊。
Oh, you want to ride this comparison? Yeah.
哦,你想要跟这个比较?好的。
So before we take the body as car analogy on a long road trip, we should talk about the opponents here. And 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 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. But again, they are not, they are not medical professionals often. But now that we've established that, we should look at the opponents of this, of this emerging technology. Yeah, specifically of digital medicine in general.
You know, 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 the solution to get people, patients to take their medicine.
And just by having the ability to track the medication doesn't mean that the person is going to take it. 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 the part of the patient.
哦,我明白了。因为现在患者可以选择是否参加。
It's opt-in and it's, you know, I. And then it'll turn into opt-out. And then a few years from now, maybe even before your son is in his twenties, it's going to be a mandatory.
Yeah, it's going to be strange if it doesn't have some. If a medicine doesn't have some sort of tracer.
如果药品没有某种追踪剂的话,那就有点奇怪了。
Yeah.
是的。
It's possible. It's quite possible at this point.
在这个阶段,这是很有可能的。
Opponents do argue that this is another case of the erosion of privacy. And one of the big sticking points is. I'm going to be familiar to a lot of people in any medicine-related field.
One of the big sticking points is the 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.
Banks. Yeah, that's another good call. These could be any number of people and in last law's change, you will never know until maybe your bank turns down a loan 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? 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 law is changed, you will also not be given a cut of what they sell. And we do want to be clear right now, right now the party line is that this information is going to be somehow anonymous, right? And it's just to aggregate data set to build better predictions to see general trends. I think it goes a little further than that, Ben. I think it's a system that we set up to 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 your doctor or your friends, nobody is going 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 the question. And 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? Who 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, because 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 fit bit, there's some sort of app on your phone that tells you to quit smoking or to count your calories or to make sure that you take a minimum of 10,000 steps a day. We know that this stuff already exists. This is a step to put it inside you.
我们知道,不断监测已经存在,对吧?如果你有一个 fit bit,那么你的手机上会有一种应用程序,告诉你戒烟或计算卡路里,或确保你每天至少走10000步。我们知道这些东西已经存在了。这是把它们放在你体内的一步。
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, whew, whatever. 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?
Yes. Like there's not a mechanism to prevent the release, maybe, of the. Sure. Yeah, like what if this sort of technology became mandatory and not opt-in and was applied to legally prescribed opiates, right? Which are 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 pursuing at 3 p.m. or something, but that you only take it then. Yeah. 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 is a very 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. It's not got MAC address, but each one has a specific serial number or something, each pill. 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 get really interesting in the future.
And another thing was overdoses. If you could find a way to control the release mechanism, you could prevent overdosing of practically anything that isn't injectable. Yeah, and that's the silver lining I'm saying. Totally. Because for proponents of this trend, make no mistake, it is a trend.
This is not the last you're going to hear about this technology. For proponents of this, that just seems like another good thing, another tick in the box of pros. Yeah. Because you're saying, oh, we could stop drug dealers. We could maybe combat at some level. What are they called, pill mills?
Yeah. It's tough for me to say that because different accents I have come out. So the. Of course, I just have to say at that point, if you wanted, I'm telling people how to do that. Go for it. But you would just, depending on what the pill is made out of, I'm assuming it can't be indestructible because you have to process it through your body. But you just get the pills and then break them up and then leave out the sensors. Oh, I see. Change the method of delivery. Yeah. Just saying.
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 very inventive. Sure. And we'll find a way. I mean, that's just.
All right, but you owe it to everybody. Paul and I include it to do a gold bloom version of 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, it can. Gold blooms like life finds a way. Or something. I think it's worth a catering. Can you do that? Can you do that one? That was it. That was it. Swing in a mess. All right. Lift pretty hard on that one. 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. This question would be, so we're talking about changing the means of delivering. Or we're talking about somehow removing the sensor, right? Another option, at least in this case, this variant of a billify, 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 of the billify 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, you don't know me. You can't run my business. I'll take the drugs I want when I want them. May, man, you don't know me. I'm going to take the drugs I want on my time in my schedule, all right? Yeah, that's good. I didn't want to. I was going soft on a Southern accent there. Say, I didn't want to offend you, but I think you nailed it. You know, it just, it lives inside me. Sometimes it escapes. That's how I feel about some things too. Yeah. Moving on. There's no need to get into a little sorts of episode 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 we went to the break that there are other people making digital drugs? Oh, yes, yes. Of course. A Florida company named E-TechRX is making another sort of sensor, ingestible sensor. There's is called the ID cap. And as we record this, it has already been tested or it's being tested on a number of different drugs, including opioids and HIV medication. Here's our works. It's made of magnesium and silver chloride. 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 low power radio signal that can be picked up by a little antenna if it's near you. What? Yep.
你是在告诉我你让我看到了一个悬念。没错,你在我们休息前说还有其他人在制造数字药品?哦,是的,没错。佛罗里达的 E-TechRX 公司正在制造另一种类型的感应器,可以被吃下去的感应器。它被称为 ID Cap。截至我们录制这段视频时,它已被测试,或正在被用于测试多种不同的药物,包括阿片类药物和艾滋病药物。下面是它的工作原理。它由镁和氯化银制成,被封装在药丸里,你不需要贴片,因为当它被吃下去时,它会在体内一直产生低功率的无线电信号,如果它靠近你,它的信号可以被一个小天线接收到。什么?没错。
And that's according to Harry Travis, the president of E-TechRX. They are currently seeking FDA clearance for this application in 2018. And of course, FDA applications are notoriously difficult unless you know the right people and have the right political connections. Hold on a second. Yeah. I just thought of something. Would these new digital pills, does that mean we will all be pooping out tiny little sensors every time we go to the bathroom? I mean, that's the dream, right? Especially, I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding, 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 20% metal and microelectronics. 20%. I mean, depending because you're talking about a 24 hour period anyway, all right. Well, 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 defecation. 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 a straight, straight lace series tone the whole way through. Seriously, I don't even think we mentioned pooping back and forth forever. We have now. But even though it does feel comedic and to a degree it is, what we're seeing is that every time there's a medical advancement, there are 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 dangerous.
Now back when it took us as a species 300 years to figure out things that seem simple today, we had a little bit more buffer time collectively. We had a little bit more of a margin in which to experience these implications and these ripple effects as they rolled out.
Okay, yeah. But now with this increasing frequency of medical advancements, which again, barring an asteroid, gamma ray burst a coronal mass ejection, then unless something destroys civilization 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 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, Deus Ex, specifically looking at you.
I completely 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 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, but I do agree with you Ben, like this is a good stepping point in the way we're going to get to the better future, the better medicine. You can definitely see the linkage there to how it can help. And 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 still bothers me because it feels like it's something ripped out of the science fiction novel or again, Deus Ex that I don't want to be a part of. What happened in Deus Ex? That's just where humans 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 going to do that. You're not going to take some cyber implants? I haven't decided yet. Phil is sofically. I think it's if I could just take my brain, my neuro, 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 get electric eyes or something. He's saying maybe. He's giving a probably not shrug. He's pointing to, as Chester said, pacemaker. Oh, okay. You're saying that pacemaker's already exists. So this is to some extent already happening. Wow. We're like miming to each other through the, this is great.
Well, off-air Paul did chime in and, well, would love you to chime in on air sometime. We'll see if we can convince him in a future episode. Don't let him see behind the curtain. Don't 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 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 on implication on always something in Philadelphia, but yes, yes, it is true.
And I just want to list something that would be a very good aspect of this. Imagine if we're talking about an elderly patient who maybe has memory problems, right? And then has a regimen of multiple drugs that they must take. This could save their lives. This could easily without a doubt save their lives and maybe increase the quality 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 on balance, overall, this looks to be a wonderful phenomenon. It has the potential to save lives, which is what medicine is supposed to be about. And 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 this stellar 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 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 you against it? Do you think on balance this, 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 prove that though, yes.
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 perhaps. So we want to hear from you. This is typically the time where we would do shout out corner. However, as we are missing our third half, 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. Some of the mysteries of Georgia guidestone. So we will wait until we are Voltron together. Captain Planeted up in full force for that letter M4Hour 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. The stuff that you think your fellow listeners would be interested in hearing.
It's really simple. Conspiracy at howstuffworks.com. And that's the end of this classic episode. 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 1833STDWYTK. If you don't want to do that, you can send us a good old-fashioned email. We are. Conspiracy at iHeartRadio.com.
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