Tartle Best Data Marketplace
Tartle Best Data Marketplace
Tartle Best Data Marketplace
Tartle Best Data Marketplace
June 11, 2021

The Need for Evidence Based Medicine

The Need for Evidence Based Medicine
BY: TARTLE

Evidence and Data Based Medicine 

Data reveals all kinds of interesting things. For example, did you know that you get almost identical results from telling a person he had surgery to remove arthritis from his knee as if you actually did the surgery? If that doesn’t blow your mind just a little bit, I don’t know what will. Of course, all research needs data, evidence to back it up. That is the case no matter what you are looking into, whether you are researching the placebo effect or investigating the effectiveness of the new COVID vaccines. Unfortunately, that data get skewed all the time, or even ignored. 

Sadly, even medicine gets tied up in politics and lobbying for kickbacks, or doctors doing things just because that’s what he was taught or that’s what is normal in his region. Think of the debate raging over masks right now. It often has little to do with evidence and has instead become more a symbol of political affiliation than anything else. And when evidence is brought up, you can use the specific evidence a given person brings up to predict their politics with a disturbing amount of accuracy. 

Then there are the stories of doctors prescribing certain medicines over others simply because they get more of a kickback from the manufacturer. Or less scary is the tendency of hospitals to order a whole barrage of unnecessary tests “to be safe”. In many cases, they just know they can charge the insurance company. They are recommending unnecessary tests for the purpose of generating more revenue. And of course doctors tend to get used to prescribing certain medicines and treatments based only on a recommendation from fellow doctors. 

Now, you might be looking at all of that and thinking that all of these practices are missing the point of what medicine is supposed to be all about. You would be right. Medicine is supposed to be both about helping people get better when they are sick and even to prevent them from getting sick in the first place. That takes doctors, scientists, and others interested not primarily in financial gain but in helping others. And those people need a good source of reliable data that can be honed and refined free of any agenda. 

Where does one get such data though? Often, the people on the ground have to rely on data from major companies interested in proving the efficacy of their own drugs. The temptation for researchers at those companies to manipulate their results is great due to pressure from their bosses. So, how do we fix that problem? 

TARTLE’s data marketplace is primed to act as a neutral third party in helping researchers and people on the ground gather valuable, agenda-free data direct from the source. Naturally, it is still possible for major firms to manipulate their research results. However, independent groups and doctors on the ground will often conduct (or wish they could) their own research to find out if the treatments they prescribe are effective. For that, they can turn to TARTLE. If they are looking for specific information, they can put the request out there to TARTLE’s members and get quality data from real people. This allows them to ask follow up questions or check up on people whenever they may need, or even subscribe to members’ data and get updates in real time. 

This allows medical practitioners a great deal of flexibility as they can develop unique treatments for people with common genetic make ups or even adjust for regional differences in the environment.

TARTLE’s marketplace can still work well for the big companies too. Consider the race to find a COVID vaccine. The very nature of its development means that it will be important to continue tracking those who get it for years to come. By getting full access to individuals, instead of partial access to multiple groups it is possible to cross reference a host of variables in genetics, habits, and environment that would not be possible otherwise. All at a lower cost than what would be paid by going through a traditional data aggregator.

Unvarnished, agenda-free source data at your fingertips to help people help others. That’s the TARTLE mission and promise. 

What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.

Summary
The Need for Evidence Based Medicine
Title
The Need for Evidence Based Medicine
Description

Medicine is supposed to be both about helping people get better when they are sick and even to prevent them from getting sick in the first place. That takes doctors, scientists, and others interested not primarily in financial gain but in helping others. And those people need a good source of reliable data that can be honed and refined free of any agenda. 

Feature Image Credit: Envato Elements
FOLLOW @TARTLE_OFFICIAL

For those who are hard of hearing – the episode transcript can be read below:

TRANSCRIPT

Speaker 1 (00:07):

Welcome to TARTLE Cast with your hosts, Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby, where humanities gets into the future and source data defines the path.

Alexander McCaig (00:25):

Jason, you can't handle the truth.

Jason Rigby (00:27):

I can't.

Alexander McCaig (00:28):

You can't handle-

Jason Rigby (00:28):

I ordered the code red.

Alexander McCaig (00:32):

... The real question is, Jason, what does truth look like? That's a fundamentally strange question.

Jason Rigby (00:38):

What does truth look like?

Alexander McCaig (00:39):

What does truth look like? I know what it looks-

Jason Rigby (00:40):

We talked about it yesterday on our Higher Density Living podcast.

Alexander McCaig (00:43):

And I know that truth is... it's agnostic.

Jason Rigby (00:48):

Right.

Alexander McCaig (00:49):

It's non-dogmatic. It's non-polarizing. It just is. All right? It's just something that it's just an inherently truth all the time. It just exists.

Jason Rigby (01:00):

It's a part of creation.

Alexander McCaig (01:01):

Right. So in... when we're looking at data when it comes to medicine, truth or evidence, there is a we not me, but all the individual health network systems do a pretty poor job of sharing patient outcomes. And a lot of that has to deal with the legal burden of trying to move medical information from one place to the next. That's just with HIPAA. You're trying to protect people's privacy.

Alexander McCaig (01:38):

And with that, there was an article here that was talking about how there was a gentleman who wrote a book on almost a pseudo-surgery, where you know how you have the placebo effect from taking a pill during some FDA drug study? Well, they were talking about how when you do... when there's arthritis in someone's knee and they go to do the surgery, there's really no difference between actually going in and doing someone's knee up. I don't know what the process is for fixing a knee than actually just leaving it alone and telling them they have the surgery. They both actually have the same marginal benefit.

Jason Rigby (02:18):

Dr. Joe Dispenza... I don't know if you've heard of him or not. He does a lot of higher conscious type teachings and stuff like that, but he's always trying to bridge science with it. He has a book called The Placebo Effect, and it's so interesting how we can persuade ourselves.

Alexander McCaig (02:33):

I think it was anywhere from 40 to 70% have the same effect-

Jason Rigby (02:36):

Isn't that crazy?

Alexander McCaig (02:37):

... which is wild with the strength of the mind, but not to sidetrack here is that the general idea is that something that's going on with a doctor in Chicago to treat something is prescribing a separate drug than what maybe a group of doctors are using in Boston. And a lot of that, those treatments and the outcomes of the patients, they're not shared between both of those different places, and someone may have a more effective treatment in Boston than they do in Chicago or vice versa.

Alexander McCaig (03:09):

So when we look at that data, it's going to be important in the future that the availability of patient outcomes, their health, their healthcare records, and their behaviors are shared in between these healthcare network systems so that proper research can actually be done in an evidence-based manner that is non-dogmatic, that actually has truthful information from an evidence-based observation of what's happened with those patients after they've gone through some sort treatment.

Jason Rigby (03:39):

And they talk about politics getting involved, and I think in medicine itself, it could be its own worst enemy, especially with these lobbyists and pharmaceutical companies and...

Alexander McCaig (03:49):

Evil politics.

Alexander McCaig (03:50):

You're like, think about the polarization of people wearing masks, "Oh, you don't wear a mask? What are you, a Republican?" Or vice versa. But it has nothing to do with any sort of medical evidence. And we see that a lot. It's like, "Oh well, why is it that you're prescribing this drug?"

Alexander McCaig (04:06):

"Well just most of the prescribers in this area, this is what we dish out."

Alexander McCaig (04:10):

"Well, do you know that it works?"

Alexander McCaig (04:12):

"I don't know."

Alexander McCaig (04:13):

"Well, have you checked any of the evidence in any other surrounding places that have chose to leave that drug?"

Alexander McCaig (04:17):

"No."

Alexander McCaig (04:18):

Well, that's the issue is that there's so much siloed information, and there's a lack of mobilization of the actual patients' identifiable healthcare information. And because of that, our research and our publications are lacking in a large body of evidence. And because we lack currently the targeted approach of taking all of that medical data and pulling it together and truly doing large body research on patient outcomes to give them the best quality of life and best quality of care, we're not doing that. But there is one way that that can be done.

Alexander McCaig (04:58):

So, the way we've set things up on the TARTLE Marketplace is that if you're looking to acquire medical information, you can get it from almost 85% of Americans. And you have all the identifiable information on their medical histories regardless if they went to a doctor in Chicago or Boston. It's all going to be there. And on top of that, you can encapsulate all their behaviors, whatever their diets are like, their emotional states. And you can capture all of that evidence-based information, and you can get it directly from the individual.

Alexander McCaig (05:35):

So rather than have the red tape hold back our research and frankly delay it and decrease the availability of us increasing the quality of life through more profound, critical evidence-based research, now you have the ability as a medical researcher, medical professional, or [inaudible 00:05:55] pharmaceutical company to go into the TARTLE Marketplace and actually acquire that identifiable healthcare information from a specific person. And you can get it once, or you can continue to subscribe to the changes in their medical status over time.

Alexander McCaig (06:10):

That's unheard of, but the benefit that is akin to what the article was talking about is the fact that if we're going to take an evidence-based approach, we need to have data. It needs to be shared effectively, right? And it has to be completely agnostic, non-dogmatic, non-political.

Alexander McCaig (06:28):

And that's the beauty about data. We can do that. Now you have the ability to capture that information outside of any politics and truly apply it to some good research.

Jason Rigby (06:37):

And I think that's probably the rub. I would think here, especially here in the United States and pretty much world with not just with the silos, but you have these good scientists, these people that are really trying to hit COVID and hit it hard, and we have this opportunity as a world, as humanity to come together over this pandemic and solve this problem. Humans have always been able to adapt and solve problems.

Alexander McCaig (07:05):

We have. And now, TARTLE as a marketplace, not to spin us up, but it's an effective tool. So we can actually come together, and we can give those top quality researchers top quality data. That's what they need. And they can get huge amounts of it.

Alexander McCaig (07:24):

There's no better way to solve this world's problems, to solve this pandemic and solve any future pandemics than having a targeted, direct focus and going directly to the individual, that source that is creating that data that can help solve that problem. One person may have the answer. We don't know though because we've never had an effective way of collecting all that information and using it effectively.

Jason Rigby (07:48):

It's so interesting. It's like you talked about in one of our previous episodes about the Spanish bringing those special type of clairvoyant people over here.

Alexander McCaig (07:59):

Oh, I liked that. They had... increase the amount of rods in their eyes.

Jason Rigby (08:01):

And I would imagine. I mean, this is just my assumption, so we know what assuming me is is there has to be somebody or a group of people that COVID doesn't affect.

Alexander McCaig (08:15):

Listen, think about it.

Jason Rigby (08:17):

I mean, I'm not talking about the asymptomatic, but where they can't even get it.

Alexander McCaig (08:20):

Where they can't even get it, but we don't know that because we've done a poor job of collecting information. We haven't had a proper tool to collect it. And the mobilization of that data has never been there.

Jason Rigby (08:31):

And I could... just doing a study on asymptomatic people and looking at... through TARTLE lens saying, "Hey, did you have COVID? Did you test positive? Do you have test results?"

Jason Rigby (08:41):

"Yes."

Jason Rigby (08:42):

"Were you asymptomatic?"

Jason Rigby (08:44):

"Yeah, I didn't even know. I just couldn't taste or smell."

Alexander McCaig (08:46):

So, if you are asymptomatic, you can-

Jason Rigby (08:48):

Now let's do a study just on those people through the marketplace.

Alexander McCaig (08:52):

... you can-

Jason Rigby (08:52):

The data that we've-

Alexander McCaig (08:53):

... What's cool about this is that because TARTLE is a third party, we can bring people together with no political objectives. What is the information you need? Great. We have something that allows the facilitation of you to acquire that information.

Jason Rigby (09:09):

Because it has to be... I know there's theories on blood type or genome or sequencing and stuff like that. There has to be... I'm not talking about the anomaly side of things, but these asymptomatic people, I guarantee you there's things that they have in common.

Alexander McCaig (09:23):

And you can-

Jason Rigby (09:24):

Whether it is a blood type or high vitamin D levels, whatever it may be.

Alexander McCaig (09:27):

... Whatever it may be. And we can objectively, objectively-

Jason Rigby (09:31):

Evidence-based.

Alexander McCaig (09:31):

... ask them in an evidence-based manner, "What is going on?" Ask them all of those questions. Do your typical food survey study. Ask them about their behaviors. Ask them how they live their current life and then to boot, buy their genetic information. Buy their genome sequence. And buy their medical record.

Jason Rigby (09:52):

Because... you... I mean-

Alexander McCaig (09:53):

That's absolutely everything.

Jason Rigby (09:55):

... I have 23andMe, and I went and downloaded my data on that. I think I'm 1.4 gigs.

Alexander McCaig (10:01):

1.4 gigs.

Jason Rigby (10:02):

Is me.

Alexander McCaig (10:03):

And they give you a CSV file, right? And here's all the raw genomic data.

Alexander McCaig (10:08):

That is some of the most valuable information. If you can figure out... if you can see what's going on genetically and pair it with your behaviors, right? You're doing something else. We are getting very close to solving a lot of problems for people.

Jason Rigby (10:22):

I know, and 23andMe when I go on there all the time, and we've had a couple negative things that we've said with the data.

Alexander McCaig (10:28):

They sold all that data to GlaxoSmithKline.

Jason Rigby (10:31):

And... but they do ask questions like that, heart disease [inaudible 00:10:35], cancer. They're always asking medical questions on there.

Alexander McCaig (10:39):

But that's only... the thing is that's, in a strange manner, only benefiting 23andMe. We have this opened up so it can benefit everybody. The marketplace is agnostic. Anybody can use it, right? So if you're a researcher, that's where you want to go. You don't want to have to go beg at the front doorsteps of 23andMe for information, especially when it's not identifiable.

Jason Rigby (11:02):

And also purchase it at a premium, I would imagine.

Alexander McCaig (11:05):

You know they're going to mark it up. But now you can just cut them out of the picture and go right to the person that actually has that genomic data, that has that medical record, that has the behaviors and have an interaction with them directly. That's the future of research and science is pooling all of our data together.

Jason Rigby (11:24):

I love that. And let's close in this, and I want to ask something kind of fun, I think, and this will be a great question. So with DNA sequencing, and we're going to get scientific here.

Alexander McCaig (11:37):

Gattaca.

Jason Rigby (11:38):

How do we... because I think this will be a fun one for everyone. Does our past lives of reincarnation-

Alexander McCaig (11:46):

That's interesting. Would that affect our genomic sequence?

Jason Rigby (11:47):

... Does it... is that our spirit, our soul or however, does that affect... I wonder.

Alexander McCaig (11:53):

We'd have to probably get... we'd have to ask some people. But I'm going to... all right, I'll take a wild stab.

Jason Rigby (12:00):

[crosstalk 00:11:59].

Alexander McCaig (12:00):

No. I'm going to say no.

Jason Rigby (12:03):

It's this individual meat suit.

Alexander McCaig (12:04):

I'm going to... because if you think about how people describe reincarnation, if this is a new meat suit, then I guess the spirit body would have no effect on the genetic design.

Jason Rigby (12:18):

That's what I was thinking too, but I just thought I'd throw it out there though.

Alexander McCaig (12:21):

I think they'd... I would assume that it would be agnostic.

Jason Rigby (12:25):

It would be... that's what I would assume too. [crosstalk 00:12:27]-

Alexander McCaig (12:27):

But what do we know?

Jason Rigby (12:29):

... I mean, that would be interesting if it had this traits of-

Alexander McCaig (12:31):

We're paeans. Or maybe in the future when we have more sensitive tech... when I say sensitive technology, we can... things that are more fine in the sensors. Maybe we can sense the energetic nature of a human being.

Jason Rigby (12:47):

... And it'll be interesting to see when we upload ourselves to the cloud, especially our consciousness, when they figure that out. Then we can... and then be put into a new body.

Alexander McCaig (12:54):

That's crazy.

Jason Rigby (12:54):

That will be-

Alexander McCaig (12:56):

What's that... what was that show?

Jason Rigby (12:59):

It was on Amazon.

Alexander McCaig (12:59):

Altered Carbon.

Jason Rigby (13:00):

Altered Carbon.

Alexander McCaig (13:01):

And they had those chips, and so essentially, your consciousness is in this chip.

Jason Rigby (13:05):

And then well-off people would have nice bodies and...

Alexander McCaig (13:08):

They wouldn't have... they had backups.

Jason Rigby (13:11):

Backups. Case something happened, then they could just [inaudible 00:13:14].

Alexander McCaig (13:14):

That's wild.

Jason Rigby (13:15):

They're back at it again. I would imagine that will happen in the future.

Alexander McCaig (13:20):

Nothing's new under the sun. Actually, I think they said that in that article, but nothing new... there is nothing new under the sun, right? And given enough time, monkeys will be able to write Shakespeare. So, who knows.

Jason Rigby (13:33):

You saw that... have you seen the chimpanzee fishing?

Alexander McCaig (13:37):

No, but I was watching that video on the space race about the one we sent up, actually here out of whatever the Air Force base here is in New Mexico.

Jason Rigby (13:46):

Kirkland Air Force Base?

Alexander McCaig (13:47):

No, it's another one a little further south.

Jason Rigby (13:49):

I know which one you're talking about.

Alexander McCaig (13:50):

Actually, that's where the chimpanzee was-

Jason Rigby (13:51):

Where White Sands is at.

Alexander McCaig (13:53):

... launched. We launched that missile up into space. I mean, the first chimp that went up there.

Jason Rigby (13:56):

That's super cool.

Alexander McCaig (13:57):

I felt so bad for him because the doctors were measuring his heart rate, and he was in a panic.

Jason Rigby (14:03):

Really?

Alexander McCaig (14:03):

He was at 200 beats per minute. And then once he actually got up into low gravity, microgravity, he was very calm.

Jason Rigby (14:11):

Very calm.

Alexander McCaig (14:12):

Little chimp.

Jason Rigby (14:13):

That's crazy.

Alexander McCaig (14:14):

I forget what his name was.

Jason Rigby (14:15):

And he survived?

Alexander McCaig (14:16):

Ham? I don't want to call him Ham or something like that, but as far as I-

Jason Rigby (14:18):

But did he survive?

Alexander McCaig (14:19):

... Yeah (affirmative), he did.

Jason Rigby (14:20):

That's awesome.

Alexander McCaig (14:20):

It was cool. They trained him for two years or something like that.

Jason Rigby (14:23):

So he was a little astronaut.

Alexander McCaig (14:25):

Think about the medical research that went into just training that chimp, make sure he was healthy.

Jason Rigby (14:29):

For two years. That's crazy. That's wild.

Jason Rigby (14:33):

Well, we'd better sayonara.

Alexander McCaig (14:36):

I'm going into microgravity right now.

Speaker 1 (14:38):

Thank you for listening to TARTLE Cast with your hosts, Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby. Where humanity steps into the future and source data defines the path.

Speaker 1 (15:02):

What's your data worth?