Consumer-Grade Medical Devices
Let's Know Things
Colin Wright
4.8 • 593 Ratings
🗓️ 16 October 2018
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week we talk about hypochondria, heart monitoring, and medical device classes.
We also discuss postmarketing surveillance, electrocardiograms, and smartwatches.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hypochondria is a condition, a very real, often very serious condition, that causes those afflicted to believe |
| 0:22.9 | they have one or many other medical conditions. The use of the word has changed over the years |
| 0:29.0 | in the same way that terms like OCD have changed with casual use. OCD, obsessive-compulsive |
| 0:35.9 | disorder, is an actual disorder that can have very serious |
| 0:39.9 | lifestyle and medical consequences. But we often use it as a hyperbolic statement about someone's |
| 0:46.2 | orderliness or meticulousness or preference for habit and routine. Likewise, we might |
| 0:52.4 | playfully call someone a hypochondriac for sometimes worrying that they |
| 0:56.3 | might be getting sick or wondering if maybe they'll catch that new plague-a-mode that's been |
| 1:02.3 | on the news all week. But that labeling, that particular use of the word, is a far cry from what |
| 1:08.9 | hypochondria actually entails. In most modern medical scenarios, |
| 1:13.6 | doctors are actually more likely to use the term somatic symptom disorder when discussing a true, |
| 1:20.6 | serious case of hypochondria. SSD refers to cases where patients are experiencing symptoms |
| 1:26.6 | that don't show up on any medical |
| 1:28.9 | examination or test, and which cannot be explained by an existing mental disorder or a |
| 1:34.0 | substance in their system. That means panic, caused by a panic disorder, does not fall under |
| 1:39.6 | this category, nor does paranoia caused by smoking weed or an ache or pain that's explained away by an x-ray. |
| 1:47.2 | Somatic system disorders cause those who suffer from them to not only feel a symptom that doesn't |
| 1:53.0 | seem to actually be there, as far as modern medicine can tell anyway, it also makes them feel |
| 1:58.6 | absolutely convinced that what they are experiencing is an indication of some specific or non-specific disease. |
| 2:07.4 | The patient will also be concerned about that thing they believe they have far out of proportion to what they would actually feel if they truly had it under normal circumstances. |
| 2:18.5 | So it's not just having a stomachache that doesn't have an obvious explanation. |
| 2:22.5 | It's having a stomachache without an obvious explanation that you also worry might be cancer. |
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