Our medical privacy rights just took a giant step backwards

Quietly, almost secretively, Big Pharma has been setting the stage to track your every move.

It started in cahoots with the FDA over five years ago, when the agency OK’d a sensor chip that pharmacies can place inside of a drug or anything else you can swallow.

As small as a grain of sand and activated when it hits your stomach, this sensor transmits a digital signal that gives out such information as your heart rate and temperature… if you’re moving about or resting… and whether you took your medication.

Now, the FDA has taken this pill-stalking plan a step further by just approving a drug with a tracking chip already included.

The implications here are enormous — and very frightening.

And before you agree to take any such drug, you need to know what all of the consequences may be. Because for a lot of patients, confidential medical information will basically become an open book.

A pill that pries
“We’ve seen time and time again that stuff that’s being transmitted ends up in the hands of people it shouldn’t.”

That comment about this new “tattletale” drug is from Dr. Walid Gellad, co-director of the Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing at the University of Pittsburgh.

And it’s exactly what many other experts are also saying — including some from the company that makes it!

In fact, Proteus, which manufacturers that itsy, bitsy tracking sensor, said two years ago that it agreed with a long list of ethical “issues” raised about how it could be misused.

Your boss, relatives, or even strangers could use the device to spy on you… intimidate you into taking drugs… and even charge you a “non-compliance” fee if you don’t!

But despite those (and many other) concerns about this technology, the FDA went ahead just last week and gave a green light to the first tracking-pill combo for the risky drug Abilify — a med widely prescribed for depression with a list of side effects as long as your arm.

After a patient swallows one of these enhanced Abilify pills, stomach acid triggers the sensor to communicate with a patch worn on the patient’s body, which then sends all the data it has collected out via Bluetooth.

Now, the “plan” here is for your smartphone or other device to capture that information and send it along to your doctor and anyone else you’ve authorized to receive it.

In the real world, however, that’s about as secure as making your bank password “1-2-3-4.”

Bluetooth is notoriously easy to hack, with tech experts saying that your smartphone or computer (and now your personal medical data) can be compromised in under ten seconds.

Of course, Big Pharma is thrilled as can be about this surveillance pill — and that makes perfect sense, as it loses billions of dollars when patients stop taking their medication.

And under this new scheme, you could potentially be roped into compliance under the threat of losing your health insurance or your doctor, or perhaps being fined. The sky’s the limit for how this can be exploited.

But don’t think for one minute that you’re in the clear if you’re not being treated for depression… or that Abilify will be the only drug that uses this technology.

Proteus has already been trying out its tracing sensor in medications for high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes.

And it’s not the only one.

Other companies are hot on the trail, researching similar prying pills for all kinds of drugs. One, named etectRx, is developing a method that won’t be using that patch due to — get ready for this — security reasons!

The VP even admitted that, yeah, “there is a creepiness factor” in this whole tracking idea.

It really tells you something when a company that stands to make a fortune on this calls it creepy!

There’s no doubt that our medical privacy is slipping away from us — and fast.

But at least for now, you can protect yourself by absolutely refusing to take any kind of drug that can track you, no matter how great your doctor makes it sound.

As that etectRx VP said, if you’re “opposed to this idea of sharing,” just tell your doctor “no thank you.”

At the moment, that’s about all we can do to safeguard ourselves.

“First digital pill approved to worries about biomedical ‘Big Brother’” Pam Belluck, November 13, 2017, The New York Times, nytimes.com