Google Health is an online storage space for your personal health records. What’s interesting in my case is that I don’t really HAVE any personal health records – or if I do they are still in my parents’ lockbox or the hands of my pediatrician, since I have yet to actually utilize the personal health insurance I’ve obtained since I was forced out of parental dependency status. So looking around the site, I couldn’t actually do much of anything: I plugged some data into my health profile [age, height...ish, weight….estimate, blood type?...I’ll have to call my mom…], realized I didn’t have any medical records to import, and then moved on to “Medications” and “Conditions.” And here’s where I actually stumbled upon something I wanted to talk about with you all.
Google Health helps you out by providing a ridiculously expansive list of conditions that you can say you have. As a relatively robust young lass, I couldn’t really think of any pressing health problems, so I found myself looking up “barotitis media”, which is why my ears don’t pop on airplanes and which is probably NOT A REAL MEDICAL CONDITION. I thought it wasn’t on the list because it’s just a thing that happens to some people, especially when they have allergies, but then I found it under “airplane ear.” Phew. In my hunting for barotitis I happened to notice that “Blackheads” was on the list. Like, having blackheads. As a medical condition. [Incidentally, blackheads comes before Bubonic Plague. Can you actually HAVE the Bubonic Plague, if you’re alive after 1350?]
Other “conditions”: Hand pain [a little vague?], Headaches – ice cream [really?], Marijuana intoxication, Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder [yes! I KNEW it was a real problem!], age spots, hypochondria [ha!], eye redness [see Marijuana intoxication], wrinkles, insect bites, and stretch marks.
In conclusion, Google Health is going to be wildly popular because it fulfills every hypochondriac’s dream of self-diagnosis with wild abandon, and it even tickles the fancy of the average human who wants to be taken seriously for every minorly misperforming function of the body. I’m all for power to the people, but I fear we may be breeding harder better faster stronger overprotective moms, even MORE women with body image issues, and more of those jerky kids who use their “medical conditions” to score 1 bedroom dorms and get out of gym class.
I’m thinking about the future, when doctors might actually check out patients’ records on Google Health – and be inundated with misinformed self-diagnoses [“Now it says here that you’re suffering from Quincke's edema…”] and detailed accounts of “calf pain with exercise” and “vomiting after partaking in Gallon Challenge” [not a real one, but you can enter your own symptoms and add them, too!]
This whole endeavor, if nothing else, has encouraged me to start generating some real medical records - so if I die and no one can find any trace of me except for my Google identity, they might have an idea of who I was and what might ACTUALLY have happened. And perhaps more importantly, I ought to use up the perks of this benefits package before I lose it. It's about time I had that pesky "unequal pupil size" checked out...
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