A $250 Biohack That’s Revolutionizing Life with Diabetes

One of the things about testing drugs and medical devices is, you really can't cover all your bases. It would be too expensive to construct a clinical trial with the statistical power necessary to reliably detect very rare side effects. I don't think anyone wants to delay releasing all new drugs to the market by 40 years so that we can be sure about what happens if you take it over a lifetime. Even post-release monitoring for these things is potentially tricky, due to the poor interoperability of EHR systems and also, in many jurisdictions, unintended consequences of health care privacy laws.

Meaning that there is no amount of due diligence that will guarantee you can't get sued. Which is fine, you can always go for proportionality instead. But then, the amount of due diligence that's necessary is driven by what costs the legal system is willing and able to impose, and, at least in the legal regime I live under (USA), they've got their own entirely other set of procedures and incentive structures that they're working with.

1) companies have a profit motive and they want to design and sell products

2) historically, we have seen that companies acting with profit motives often have incentives to ignore problems with their products and even actively suppress them

3) the government wants to incentivize companies to make new products that help people

4) but they also don't want large numbers of people to die, or even small numbers of people, due to errors of any kind.

5) we have ample evidence that when unregulated, errors occur and people die. Statistically across large numbers of drugs and medical treatments, we have enough data to make strong, but not perfect statements about which processes minimize negative problems while maximizing availability of product to sick people. In some cases, people die because executives explicitly chose to cut corners. With regulation, we can catch those executives and put them in jail.

6) in general, the one thing that comes out of all of this is that extensive record keeping is required for investigators to deal with problems when they occur. Most of regulation is just record keeping- what did we do, what happened when we did it- and change control. Literally, my job was to ensure that firmware updates didn't change the observable properties of a system that was making a drug that saved people. Yes, when a firmware of a machine that makes drugs is updated, and it has a bug, people can die.

7) given about a hundred years of experience in this area, enough people who work on "reliability" (like SRE in tech) people have developed a set of techniques, called regulation, which attempts to minimize the number of deaths, while still allowing products to reach the market. Like SRE, it's a combination of hard-won experience and a lot of intelligence, along with not enough monitoring data.

8) I also feel pain and unhappiness that pharma doesn't move faster. It wasn't until I worked daily on product development and implementing regulation that I began to appreciate that this is a truly complicated problem with a lot of variables, incentives and players.

9) Even giving my best good faith effort, I simply cannot credit people who give anecdotal evidence about friends with diabetes. There are a number of reasons for this, but basically, if you do enough large-scale decision making, you'll find that anecdotes introduce bias that can lead to poor decision making. I see problems, also, in the DIY community where people sort of assume the best possible results; in science, after you run enough experiments, you get to see: it's easy to fool yourself and think what you've done is good, but it really has to percolate through the system and get evaluated and reproduced by many people before you can trust it.

If you don't think the above logic chain is reasonable, that's OK. Many people aren't happy with how slowly pharma and medical DX industries and FDA work. But, you should basically understand that the entire goal here is to ensure good products make it to the market without "too many unnecessary deaths".

The worst part of all of this is that I dedicated many years of my life to improving the speed at which drugs could be discovered and brought to patients, only to learn that the primary reasons we can't, are political, structural, systemic, and incentivized. If somebody had a better solution than what the current market has, I can point funding at them.

What happens when the sensor is not reading correctly? Isn’t that the biggest possible danger? The human “knows” it’s wrong but software?

And again, you get at least 8 hours of history graphed on the display now. If it doesn't look sensible (w.r.t eating and insulin doses), you need a backup. If the old fashioned blood glucose meter gives a wrong reading, you are much worse off.

Note that the sensors are tested and approved, not the DIY hack the article talks about.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13300-018-0373-...