You’re sick if Apple says you’re sick.
It looks like Apple has entered The Nocebo Effect business.
You don’t feel sick?
Doesn’t matter.
The “Vitals” app on your Apple watch knows and will plant the thought that you are getting sick.
You say your wrist temperature, breathing, and heart rate could be changing for any number of reasons?
Doesn’t matter.
Apple says it’s important!
You think the “symptoms”/pre-symptoms your watch is “detecting” would have dissipated without you getting truly ill?
Doesn’t matter.
If Apple says you’re about-to-be sick, then YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE SICK!
The Daily Mail article quotes users whose Not-Sick Lives were suddenly changed by the Vitals App:
- ‘I started using Vitals when it first came out and since then I’ve gotten sick about twice. Both times it knew a couple days in advance and I hadn’t felt anything wrong.’
- ‘My Apple Watch detected a few things with my vitals days before I tested positive for Covid! So clever and very useful tech to have – especially in such a fast-paced world.’ (@RoryEvaans)
- ‘My watch knew I wasn’t 100% after my COVID and flu jabs as all three vitals (Wrist Temperature, Heart Rate and Respiratory Rate) were outliers and that’s how I knew I was not well, amazing tbh.”
I’m thinking these people might not have jobs which require them to physically show up to work each day, but let’s imagine they do. Armed with Vitals, I can hear them saying, “Heads up, colleagues! Apple says I’ll be sick next week. Probably a good idea for me to take off right now, in case I have pre-symptomatic COVID and spread it to everyone!”
Seriously: do we need more excuses for people to be less productive via their own “15 Days to Stop the Spread” declarations? Apologies to my male subscribers & husband, but can’t we all envision such hyper self-monitoring giving rise to more and “worse” Man Colds?
I wish I could blame this insanity entirely on Apple. Alas, reporting apps for flu have been road-tested for years (example, example, example); likewise, web searches and social media activity are studied by testing companies such as Biofire.
Make no mistake: all parties who stand to profit understand very, very well how to change people’s thinking about illness – and I doubt it began in the Internet Age. The U.S. government/military, at least, probably has decades of classified reports on how to induce psychogenic illness “outbreaks”. (Here’s an “unclassified” DHS document along those lines that has made the rounds: https://file.wikileaks.org/file/dhs-mass-psychogenic-illness-2006.pdf)
You may not have an Apple Watch, or any kind of health-tracker app, but you most certainly have monitor-able online behaviors like those leveraged for The Pretend Pandemic of 2020 – which can be used to create The ‘Next Pandemic’.
Because it isn’t the illness/diseases that are being surveilled and steered. It’s the human mind.
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