AFib patients using wearable devices are more likely to engage in high rates of symptom monitoring and experience anxiety than non-users, a study shows.
Seems to me that these people are being conscious about their health, and that’s somehow a bad thing.
There’s consciousness, and then there’s anxiety inducing obsessive symptom checking. Which may do more harm than good given these are cardiac patients.
Everything in moderation.
Surely we van look at apps that allow more informed data but without the anxiety. Like, here’s your data, this is less frequent than average. Or, here is your data, its the same as before. Or here is your data, its slightly different again, so we’ve already notifies your doctor, but usually this is nothing to be concerned about. Etc.
Lots of patients with other conditions have yo do similar, like diabetics monitoring sugar levels. Or asthmatics who can induce attacks by getting stressed about attacks.
We could build in some mindfulness exercises which help with anxiety. I’d say overall, its better.
It may also be when they were asked. I monitor whatever my watch allows, and plan to base future Watch decisions mostly on new health monitoring.
With each new capability, I obsess about it for a while until it fades into the background. Now I check them all once in a while but the bad part is I don’t follow them closely enough to improve my well-being. There’s a balance somewhere between my tendencies and people who don’t stop
AFib patients using wearable devices are more likely to engage in high rates of symptom monitoring and experience anxiety than non-users
Well no shit—how can non-users engage in high rates of symptom monitoring if they don’t have symptom monitors?
“Symptoms monitoring” refers to the conscious state of paying attention to your symptoms, not using devices to monitor your vitals.
There is no “symptom monitoring” device anyway. A “symptom” is something a patient reports, it’s not generally quantifiable using sensors. There’s no sensor that will measure if your chest hurts or if you feel nauseous, you have to tell your doctor that you are experiencing these things.
But having a constant personal feed of vital stats can make you pay a lot more attention to those symptoms if it turns into an exercise in paying excess attention to your body. Basically, too much information encourages hypochondria.
Elevated heart rate is a symptom, one that is quantifiable and monitorable.
“Tachycardia” is a sign. “Palpitations” or “heart racing” are symptoms. Signs are the objective things that can be measured and recorded as hard data. Symptoms are what the patient reports feeling that are not measurable. In taking a history and physical, the symptoms tell the physician what signs to look for.
That makes sense. I don’t have a fitness watch but I guess I could apply this to other areas of my life. Maybe there’s a useful and more general theory to be found.
I personally sometimes experience a lot of PVCs. I obsess over getting a good reading to be able to show my doctor. It also becomes impossible to tell yourself it’s all in your head. My son is a nurse and I know the point at which PVCs go from uninteresting to concerning. At least I know they are never really urgent.
But my primary anxiety comes from my heart not working the way it’s supposed to and being able to feel irregular heartbeats. I take peace in being able to see for myself that they aren’t frequent enough to be overly concerned. But they are a reminder I’m not going to be around forever, that’s for sure.
