Imagine A Day When Your Medical History Could Be In One Secure Place, Easily Accessed By Your...

Imagine A Day When Your Medical History Could Be In One Secure Place, Easily Accessed By Your Doctors, Who Could Collaborate More Effectively And Embarrass You In Front Of An Auditorium Full Of Strangers

It took me a few times watching this G.E. commercial to realize that they were saying that an easily accessible database for sharing patients’ medical history was a good thing. It’s confusing.

The patient is clearly uncomfortable, sitting there in his underwear, before an audience of authority figures he didn’t originally know was there. It’s sort of a nightmare, right? A common one. All these people are watching me. They have all this information about me! My smoking habit, the glandular disorder, the time I thought that heat rash was skin cancer. What about IBS? Or venereal disease? Or that time I got that thing stuck in that uncomfortable place?

And now everybody’s talking about it! Doesn’t this ad tap into the very insecurities that makes people reluctant to share important information with their doctors in the first place? Not to mention what the tea-partiers will think, now that the death-panel bill has passed. I mean, I think that this kind of technology is good. But I worry that this ad sends the opposite message. It’s like a paranoid drug fantasy come to life. Give me my pants back. I have to get out of here.