They have been standard for at least 10 years. The one biggest thing, the nurse/physician is supposed to make sure they are talking to the patient alone. That is, spouse/significant other/etc. needs to be out of the room during questioning because they could be the abuser.
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I think you can afford to rest easy. āTheyā are much more likely to be interested in the fact that Iām not receiving benefits under the Black Lung Benefits Actā¦or any other more actionable data from my medical history.
I have my 6 monthly visit with my intervention cardiologist tomorrow and have just filled out my questionnaire for this year. Iām more irked by the realisation that I will need to be starving myself during the daughterās bash for Fatherās Day this afternoon than potential failures of HIPAA compliance.
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LOL.
Iāll just drop this here.
I own some PLTR.
PLTR, for reference, has been labeled āskynetā for a couple decades.
Itās not just for the military, any more.
ralph
Edit to addendum:
Call me cynical. Skeptical. Also paranoid.
āTheyā (the JCs, PE owners of healthcare providers, etc, n L&Ss) gonna use AI, data mining, data analysis, manipulation, etc for THEIR goals.
PLTR is being called āthe OS for AIā.
MSFT, MDB, SNOW, and other companies also have thumbs in the data mining pie.
Just cause I own PLTR doesnāt make me immune.
((((ā¦))))
Hereās another thing that makes me go hmmmā¦:
āThis call may be monitored for training and quality assuranceā
āTrainingā is mentioned first to anaesthetize the customerās attentionā¦ To red herring the ācritical thinkingā.
āand quality assuranceā ā¦ Is the operative phrase.
āTheyā record the conversation so that LATER, if thereās a dispute, they can pull up the recording and use it against customer.
What happens if when the customer service representative comes online, the customer refuses to be "recorded?
Hmmmā¦
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Why do you have to starve yourself??? If you are doing bloodwork in the morning, a 12 hour fast is usually sufficient, so if your bloodwork is at 9am, just stop eating at 9pm and the results will be correct.
Just making sure.
Bloodwork scheduled for 7.30. A 12 hour fast is commonly recommended because most folk donāt hack even that. 16 hours is for those in the know (about physiology of digestion and absorption etc)
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At my most recent blood draw my doc said no need to fast, latest research says it doesnāt significantly change anything.
Mike
I had to fast and my blood screening came up low in Iron. I have been only eating one meal a day because I was trying to get some weight off. The Doc said that couldnāt be the reason for low Iron. I ate normal and came in a month later and all the iron deficiency was gone and my charts looked great.
If we ask the do you feel safe and can you afford meds etc questions. At least for me, it doesnt make it into the chart if the answer is benign.
Imagine writing āpt feels safe at homeā after every appendix and gb. Only goes in the chart if it changes something..
Pertinent negatives and positives.
Also tbh it would be much easier to mine that data from your cell phone browsing history and bank data
Ralph,
I agree. Medical information is power. Perhaps the ultimate power.
That information is less powerful than medical information. Unless you run up against the IRS.
My point was lots of your health info is on your phone. How many steps you take. How long you are sedentary. Which doctors offices you visit and how often. How often you go to the pharmacy. How often you order uber eats and what you order. What size pants you order on amazon. Its very much less protected and more often sold than health/hippa protected medical documents. Theres also no real penalties or mechanism fo enforcement to stop them from selling that data.
If i remember correctly, we are able to more accurately track flu outbreaks and spreads by google searches before/faster than weāre able to collate medical data confirming positive flu tests/doc visits/rx
I have a Fitbit watch. Google keeps the data since Fitbit is a Google company.
I was stunned to find that the data includes 30,000 pulse records per day. Why in the world does Google need to store pulse rate every second for all their Fitbit customers for months at a time? Not to mention steps per minute, blood oxygen level, minutes of deep and REM sleep, etc. An enormous amount of data.
Why?
Wendy
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Because it can? People ask why I keep some things. I say āit might come in handyā.
Steve
Granular data.
Is more valuable for analysis, mining, ā¦ And selling.
Who knows how some future āresearchersā will dig into the data.
Complexity theory suggests unknown connections.
ralph
And, IIRC, Wendy did some data mining herself.
DB2
Did you find that to be the case? Assuming you followed adviceā¦as in āfastedā conscientiously in the past and did not for your most recent, that is. Iām taking a lot more notice of specific values on my lipid panel nowadays than in the past. A relative term, of course since, as mentioned a time or 17, Iāve kept a fairly concerned eye on those parameters for getting on for 2 decadesā¦it was just my docs who were unconcerned. I guess it depends on what an individual means by significant.
At my recent cardiology appointment, and as I was asking my usual unanswerable questionsā¦āHow do I know if treatment is workingā¦is there anything else I should do?āā¦my cardiologist looked back over my lipid profile as he was answering and spotted a bump on the log with my LDL-C values in Dec 2023. On thinking back, I realised that Iād had an unexpected, unfasted, blood draw that day as it was a pre surgery visit for āclearanceā prior to my lapiplasty. Although there was nothing to be gained in a clinical sense, I tended to agree with the PA in that you canāt be too careful with these orthopedists and weād best check all the boxes. The ābumpā was up to 48 mg/dLā¦but from my usual lows of 30 - 33 or so.
So, I guess the answer to whether or not itās necessary isā¦āit dependsā. For the common-or-garden variety patient whoās toggling in the realms of āborderlineā elevation and who has a CAC score in single digits (or lower) such a small fluctuation might well be insignificant as a measurement of treatment goals (because there is no treatment)
For anyone else, that may not necessarily the case, though. In my instanceā¦where maintaining a super low LDL-C value is the treatment protocol ā¦such a large relative increase might well have been something my cardiologist felt significant enough to want to repeat the blood test fasted had it been a regular follow up visit.
They really should NOT ALLOW the cholesterol tests to ever be done on blood that was drawn without properly fasting. It just muddies the waters later on. I know each bloodwork report has āfastingā or ānon-fastingā at the top, but one, they often get that wrong, and two, itās at the top of page 1, but when someone is reading page 3 with the lipids on it, they donāt remember it from page 1.
Just had a blood draw a month ago without fastingā¦nothing significantly different.
Back before COVID I would donate blood a few times a year and they did a cholesterol test and you are not supposed to fast for this. The noise in those results not really different than my yearly fasting results that I recall
Mike
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Well, as Iāve mentiond ā¦ ooooh everso many times ā¦ Iāve come to the conclusion that a good many providers arenāt tremendously particular about how hard they focus on details. Especially at primary care level where thereās a steady parade of folk who donāt have much wrong with themā¦or donāt appear to if you donāt look too hard.
Manifestly, circumstances have changed a bit for me now that an unnecessarily long period of supervised neglect/sloppy doctoring is being belatedly addressed. Since my intervention cardiologist gave the little jump in my LDL-C a second look, and even though the unfasted value would still qualify as acceptably low, I donāt think heās going to be suggesting I have my blood drawn in an unfasted state any time soon.
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