OOne thing led to another and I found myself topless on the couch and then a cardiologist, nose wrinkled, explained that everything was fine except my heart was a bit… weird? I can’t remember the exact words, but I think they amounted to something more than “eccentric,” much less than bizarre. Although he was investigating something completely different, he had noticed that a valve up there was a bit strange, had absolutely nothing to do with the problem I was here for, and was unlikely to affect my future health in any way. would also influence. But now that he had seen it, he thought it best to tell me. But it’s better to know, I asked, right? He raised his shoulders. “Sometimes?” he said noncommittally. “It’s complicated.”
At home I noticed that I was more aware of my heartbeat and listening for unusual sounds. When I developed indigestion a few months later, I went to the doctor thinking it was that valve, perhaps about to explode. I have no history of anxiety, was always largely disinterested in what was happening in my body – I thought about it in a similar way to the goings-on in the vast, deep waters of the sea, necessarily inscrutable. But after this defect was revealed to me, I became uncomfortably aware of all these moving parts, everything that could go wrong.
When I read Caroline Crampton’s recent intimate study of hypochondria, A body made of glass, with its precise explanation of health anxiety disorder as “a perceived illness of the body that exists only in the mind,” my hand immediately went to my chest. Crampton traces the rise of potions and devices that promised relief from imagined illnesses, from 18th-century quackery to today’s wellness industry, with things like Zeebo pills (currently £73 on Amazon), advertised as a placebo, in which “you are active ingredient,” and plans for technology in which every part of our mind and body can be sensed. But, she asks, can we know too much? I thought of Crampton’s book when I read recent criticism of the rise of blood sugar monitoring and the Zoe app. These are part of a growing trend of personalized diets, but along with other criticisms (including a lack of evidence on their effectiveness), the NHS’s national diabetes advisor, Professor Partha Kar, told the BBC that the use of continuous glucose monitors ( designed for people with diabetes) when there are no health reasons to do so can lead to an obsessive focus on numbers that in some cases “can translate into eating disorders.”
These are apps for the ‘good guys’, healthy people who are concerned about their health, a growing market at a time when new technology and the old Internet are fueling fear by offering vast knowledge to anyone with Wi-Fi. It is a successful business model because it is as much for the concerned people as it is for its creator. Parents are particularly vulnerable to the marketing because their health concerns are projected onto their children. In this month New YorkerJia Tolentino describes her attempts to hide her pregnancy from her phone. This meant no buying baby clothes online, no period trackers, no pregnancy apps – she wanted to avoid being watched, which is especially difficult when it is advisable to monitor yourself.
Between the births of my two children, the technology was offered to parents who wanted to both monitor their pregnancy (through additional ultrasounds, for example) and observe their baby (using devices such as cuddly toys with cameras hidden in them or discs to attach to diapers that you warn you if your baby rolls over) has exploded. In 2020, I was surprised at how difficult it was, for example, to buy a baby monitor that didn’t include a camera, or require a Wi-Fi connection, or record my data. And yet, despite his appetite for parenting technology, Tolentino finds that it very rarely leads to better outcomes for the babies, but rather exacerbates or, worse, creates the very fears these devices were purchased to soothe. The control that the concerned people seek by monitoring their babies or bodies is an illusion.
That’s disturbing, isn’t it, given the rise of products aimed directly at them. The global wearable technology market (devices such as fitness trackers) was valued at US$61.30 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow significantly by 2030. My nine-year-old’s school friends regularly compare FitBits. And yet there is a possibility that trackers and the like may do more harm than good for some people. In the New statesman in 2019, a professor of cardiovascular medicine criticized a major study on atrial fibrillation, a common heart rhythm problem, that used Apple Watch owners. He said there were no major health benefits from screening these low-risk people, in short: “the kind of people who use an Apple Watch.” Furthermore, the study would “cause significant distress” in healthy people who receive irregular heart rate notifications.
Health anxiety is evolving in line with scientific knowledge, with descriptions such as ‘cyberchondria’ (where fears escalate due to information found online) on the rise and research suggesting that our new casual contact with medical knowledge is only making people’s fears worse, in instead of delivering us from it. them. I am deeply outraged that tech companies are playing on these fears and creating new concerns for profits. I think so, we can know too much.
Every now and then a little chest pain or memory will worry me and I’ll wonder about my deformed heart. But then I sternly remind myself that what happens under the sea, or (unless it affects my life) what happens deep inside my body, is actually none of my business.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on X @EvaWijseman