Will an app a day, keep the doctor away? A critical look at BPS based phone apps.

Good LORD. And people say crime doesn't pay!

 

And some more. The app is also big on forgiveness and how that helps heal conditions. They quote some research in their app.

Also here’s an email about how it helps M.E

 

Their 5 day healing challenge from Instagram which I got an email to follow. This is day 1

 

The worry with the rise of this psychosocial stuff is that someone I know will see this and it will feed into their already warped perceptions about what my illness is. It’s horrible. It makes life even harder for us.

 

WTF?

 

That's a lot of potential income then.

I can't see anything on the apple apps preview page that advises people to see a doctor to make sure their chronic pain isn't a serious condition before using the Curable app.

So it seems that doctors are now offering treatment to patients that they haven't seen. How is that ethical - or legal?

 

Curable is mentioned in this study;

Evaluation of Self-Management Support Functions in Apps for People With Persistent Pain: Systematic Review

Hemakumar Devan et al Feb 2019

https://mhealth.jmir.org/2019/2/e13080/

Comment from conclusion;

 

The lead author of the above study is developing an app specifically for New Zealanders;

https://www.noted.co.nz/health/health-health/chronic-pain-how-online-tools-can-help-manage

 

New Zealand again. (@Hutan, above post as well.)

Despite the lack of evidence that it works...

https://www.healthnavigator.org.nz/apps/c/curable-app/

While it does mention some cons, there is this review by a doctor;

https://www.healthnavigator.org.nz/apps/c/curable-app/?tab=22799

 

This is a complete garbage statement.

Its not the pain, its the condition underlying the pain which dictates what someones ceiling level of exertion is. That underlying condition dictates recovery times of tissue and therefore if your recovery time is longer than a healthy person by definition you will be "resting" more.

I can just see the think bubble coming out of this guys head....

People who can exert themselves to the maximum level don't have pain therefore people who have pain should exert themselves to the maximum.....

 

The real challenge with projects like this is quality of content. It takes a huge effort to ensure that, with associated costs that are pure loss and those don't scale well, not much economies of scale. To work properly it would need serious public money and backing from institutions, as they would otherwise not trust the data.

And there are plenty of those already, fragmenting an existing pool of competitors facing the same challenge. PatientsLikeMe has been operating for 15 years. It's neat, but without involvement from medical or public health institutions it amounts to nothing. Bit like Wikipedia. It's useful but don't cite it in serious work.

However it would work better as a disease-specific app, rather than a generic one. There's just too much data to work with when you try to account for every medical concept and, oddly enough, huge variations in what basic terms even mean, making those that are common hard to compare. But that only solves one part, I'm not sure who the target population for the aggregate data would be.

 

The Pain Toolkit

https://pain-sense.co.uk/the-apps/the-pain-toolkit/

https://pain-sense.co.uk/the-apps/pmp/

http://pain-sense.co.uk/about-us/painsense-partners/

Bob Lewin

Is this the same Prof Robert Lewin mentioned in this post?

https://www.s4me.info/posts/153599/

 

Yes, see also:

http://npowered.co.uk / http://www.pain-management-plan.co.uk/