The irrational use of portable medical devices is becoming a threat. The devices especially for measuring fat, sugar are becoming rampant. Each device has certain accuracy and reliability. Use of such a device without its proper knowledge may be harmful. It leads to medicalization of community where other problems like self medication start.

The use of medical devices should be controlled by doctors themselves.

 Thank you for your  answer i am accepting your answer  but on other side A good reliable devices gives real time motoring of patient chronic conditions such as blood pressure , diabetes. and reduce the diagnosis cost.

Hi Raviteja,

There are many areas of medicine where such devices are extremely useful. As only one example, there are many monitoring and medication delivery devices for chronically ill patients. Without constant monitoring, these patients are very likely to be out of normal ranges for their condition (e.g., blood glucose levels for diabetics, airflows for COPD patients, fluid overload in CHF patients, etc.). 

As I see it, the problem is not the devices themselves, but how they are monitored, and how quickly and appropriately medical attention is provided when such devices indicate problems.

Ariel

i obey with you ariel

Thanks  for your suggestions but i feel its the treating physicians duty to guide appropriately about the rational and limited use of the available digital medical devices to their respective patients and discourage self medication. People are doing more harm than benefit through self medication , monitoring and analysis as they are not informed and educated about the functions.

Yes definitely, specially in developing countries like Pakistan, where quacks are working everywhere and  literacy level is low.

These devices are posing threat to health and lives of many as general public and patients are using these for screening, monitoring and self medication

Definitely true. These devices are abound in the hands of quacks and untrained personnel who claim heaven and earth and all sorts of things unchallenged. In the end the society is worse for it.

As much as technology has contributed in the improvements of health services and patient care, the use of mobile devices in health care needs regulation in order to protect patients, clients and the public at large. I agree with Ariel that the increase of these mobile devices on the market is not a problem but how these devices are used.

Two points:

1)  It depends on the individual health practitioner whether the monitoring devices are perceived as a threat - or a partnership opportunity. The sensible thing is to encourage the patient to come in for reading the device on  regular basis, so that any health issues identified can continue to be monitored and treated. That way the doctor will probably have a closer relationship with the patient's care.

2) As an historian of medicine, I can tell you that quacks and self-medication are not new phenomena. The practice of touting "cures" is very old and self-medication is also very old. The princess who was to become Queen Anne of England had a strong belief in her "occulist", an illiterate man who had started as a blacksmith. Patent medicines sold over the counter in druggists' stores (pharmacies) and by grocers, were very popular in England in the 1830s and 1840s (and were noted then by Friedrich Engels, in his sociologic observations of poverty in the industrial towns of England). He  remarked on the keenness of the English poor to take over-the-counter medications, many of them containing opiates, such as the mixtures used to soothe teething babies.  In the 1950s in Australia a product called Hearn's was advertised in the newspapers as defeating a whole list of germs. It was advertised as a cure-all.

Some ordinary people used to take Forde's Pills, which I think were for bowels. Mothers in the 20th century dosed their children on Saturdays with Andrews' Liver Salts, Kruschen Salts, Senna and other mixtures - diets were very low in fibre then!

Girish mentioned accuracy. A device I came across a few days ago was being used by a family member to take a baby's temperature while I was working with the mother and baby. The electronic device was waved round the baby's body and obviously was expensive, and therefore the family believed in it.  It gave a different temperature reading at different ends of the baby's body. It gave different readings every few minutes. This gave me the opportunity to suggest that the variable readings made it unreliable and to say that taking the temperature only needed to be done when there were clinical indications. Otherwise they were getting anxious for nothing.

Clinicians can encourage their clients to discuss with them what devices they are using for measurement and then they can check them. It is a good idea also to ask what websites they have searched. There are some good ones and it is better to be sympathetic and not judgmental, and recommend the good, accurate online sources. A few years ago my orthopaedic surgeon asked me to look at two websites for information about implants, which saved him a lot of time and gave me accurate information in agreeing to some new technology. I sometimes recommend accurate online links to mothers needing specific information where a video will help explain what I've been telling them. It thus supports what I've told them - and doesn't undermine it.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276121947_Mobile_Health_Services_A_New_Paradigm_for_Health_Care_Systems?ev=prf_pub

Article Mobile Health Services: A New Paradigm for Health Care Systems

Hello

I suggest you to read this recent study for a glimpse at mobile EMR use and effects on physicians.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27268720

Best