Do-It-Yourself Medicine is enabled by a cellphone

Almost every strategy to contain...maybe even reduce... medical costs is essentially a scheme to ration medical care and especially high technology-based drugs or procedures such as cat-scans. This seems backward to me. Isn't a better way to reduce the costs of using technology and to make it more widely available... rather than limit it to those who can afford to pay for it. Perhaps the only way to realistically reduce medical costs is to make medicine less labor-intensive and to miniaturize tests and most of all to anticipate the onset of disease. Perhaps in the future, disease can be eliminated but until then, early detection and treatment remains the best way to manage the inevitability of disease as a part of the human condition. Medicine must move in the direction of home monitoring and measurement, computer-aided self diagnosis, and do-it-yourself treatment. It would seem to be the only way we will be able to afford comprehensive care. Hospitals and doctors' offices must be replaced by specialist treatment clinics and home-based diagnosis. There is a deregulatory element to this as well. As technology progresses, people and lower-level medical professionals will be able to do more without a doctor's supervision; the laws that restrict certain types of decisions and permissions to someone with a license to practice medicine will have to be relaxed. Will doctor's fight home-doctoring like lawyers have fought home-lawyering? Do it yourself tax software has reduced the need for the lowest level of tax accountant. Will do-it-yourself doctoring eliminate the need for the general practitioner, leaving only specialists for the most complex and uncommon cases? Wide use of comprehensive electronic medical records, updated regularly with data from individual sensors, analyzed by computers using constantly improved diagnostic algorithms can probably identify incipient disease earlier with greater accuracy than infrequent hurried examinations by primary care doctors. Cell phones, as ubiquitous digital powered devices, may be an excellent vehicle for housing individual medical sensors that don't require embedding in the body. Cell phones also offer an inexpensive and widely available means for interacting with a centralized computer-based medical monitoring center. Read the Telemedicine article in the Economist.