When it comes to your kids and your family’s health, nothing should be left to chance. That’s why so many moms started becoming wary of vaccinations after the discredited and disgraced Andrew Wakefield fraudulently suggested that vaccines give you autism. When you use healthcare products, you should be informed of the risks, which is why it’s so hard deciding which products to trust.
The Importance of GMP
When it comes to choosing healthcare products, you shouldn’t be too worried about hygiene issues. Most healthcare products are developed by companies like Team Technologies. They will be duty-bound by a series of practices known as Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) or specific safety, hygiene, and quality control processes. The good thing with these processes is that you can give them a read (though some are quite big) to decide if they suit your risk tolerance.
FDA Approval
A healthcare consumable should be approved by the FDA or another governmental body that you trust, like the EU. However, you should take precautions and not trust the FDA completely without understanding why they say something is safe. Take BPA, for example, BPA is a component of many plastics (including those with close contact with food and your body) and has been classified as not dangerous by the FDA. The problem is, it’s been cleared at high doses but not at low doses, which scientists think are the dangerous doses for this chemical.
The New Risk in Healthcare
The products that you’re skeptical of shouldn’t just be those that could pose direct harm to your body. There’s an increasing danger of another risk regarding your family’s safety: data collection. Before you use any products that could harvest your data (e.g., a Fitbit), make sure you read their privacy statement and trusty the company. Even companies like Google have been under fire recently for mismanaging health data… and Google last year bought Fitbit for $2.1 billion. Google is one of the world’s largest data companies, questions are being asked about why they think Fitbit is so valuable.
You may ask yourself: why does it matter? It’s just data.
This is a question that many people wonder across the developed world, especially with the publicity surrounding Europe’s GDPR laws. The special danger with healthcare data is that private companies aren’t just getting information about your behaviors (like which apps you like to use and where you use them); they’re getting information about your biological functions.
So, imagine you get your child a Fitbit or some other exercise-tracking tool. Now, imagine when they’re older, they want to get health insurance but find that their premium is much higher than their friends because, according to the data they bought from the exercise-tracking tool’s manufacturers, your child doesn’t exercise enough. That might sound fair enough to some, but imagine the device was faulty.
There are many different reasons to be concerned about this new risk in healthcare, partly because there’s so much potential for abuse in the future, something that gets concerning when data companies like Palantir get called out by Amnesty International.
