Personal Science Week - 241031 Health Conferences
What we saw at last week's HLTH 2024 and the Biohackers World
Exactly a year after we wrote about HLTH2023, we joined 12,000 other attendees in Las Vegas last week at HLTH2024 to learn more about the latest products and services that might be of interest to fellow health-minded personal scientists. As a bonus, we also attended Biohackers World 2024 in Miami over the weekend.
This week I’ll summarize some of what I saw that might be of interest to fellow personal scientists.
HLTH is by far the most important healthtech expo that normal people can attend (well, if you don’t mind the $4000 admission price). The more prestigious JP Morgan conference in January is by invitation-only, so HLTH is where the rest of the serious health watchers go. Drawn by big-name conference speakers (including First Lady Dr Jill Biden), you can meet just about any health or diagnostics-related company here.
This year much of the buzz was on the implications of the GLP-1 inhibiting obesity drugs, though I was pleased to also see former Stanford surgeon and Levels Health co-founder Casey Means as well. She is one of many credible and intelligent people involved with public health who support the “Make America Healthy Again” initiative, which — my prediction — will become a significant force regardless of next week’s Presidential election. Too many people are being encouraged to fix problems by paying pharmaceutical companies for expensive drugs rather than solve the root cause. These ideas will only become stronger.
But to be honest, I didn’t learn much from the presentations. It was more interesting to walk through the exhibits and talk to some of the vendors, especially those with new products. I can’t do justice to the zillions of interesting people I met, but here’s a brief taste of what I saw.
Continuous Blood Pressure Monitoring
It’s finally becoming possible and affordable to do real-time continuous blood pressure monitoring, so one product that excited me was Bio Beat, a 5-day continuous blood pressure monitoring device. It’s cuff-less. Instead of wrapping it around your wrist or arm, you attach a small patch to your chest. Prescribed by a physician, the cost is about $1000 for a 5-day run.
Metabolomic Blood Testing
Molecular You is a Vancouver Canada company that sells a metabolomic and proteomics blood test. You need to get the blood draw at an approved laboratory, which until recently required a trip to specific facilities in Canada only. But now they’re expanding to the US, where for about $600 they will study for blood for a gazillion factors which thousands of studies have shown are better than genetic tests at predicting disease.
Reminds me of proteomics test maker Soma Logic, Iollo, or the comprehensive tissue and imaging tests from Stanford’s Michael Snyder-affiliated Q.bio I’ve heard good things about all of them, so I’ll look forward to learning more when Molecular You opens a lab near me, supposedly in the next few months. Incidentally, I noticed that former Viome Chief Medical Officer Helen Messier is listed as their clinical medical advisor.
Other products
We personal scientists are open-minded and try not to dismiss any idea out of hand, no matter how far-fetched. We like to study that fine line between geniuses who are far ahead of their time and the lunatics whose theories spiral into delusion. We’d rather risk exploring something improbable than miss out on the next big discovery, but we stay sharp, knowing full well that not every maverick is a misunderstood genius—sometimes, they’re just plain wrong.
The expensive admission fee for HLTH makes it harder for smaller products to get attention, so if that’s what you want, then Biohackers World was more interesting.
The WAVWatch is a $600 wristwatch that can shoot from among 1000 different acoustic sound frequencies into your wrist, supposedly inducing some kind of healing. The guy who demonstrated it to me swears by it, insisting that it protects him from all the terrible electromagnetic radiation that bombards us these days. A chiropractor, he checked something on my neck before and after removing my Apple Watch. Sure enough, he finds that my neck changes significantly. He adds that during COVID, the FCC did a switcher-oo on us, transforming our cell phone system to use the same 2.4 GHz frequency as your microwave oven. “Do you want to microwave your body every time you use your phone?” he asks.
I tried this $650 FRENZ Brainband, which the makers claim will help you fall asleep faster by using “personalized audio therapy”. I wasn’t able to test it while sleeping, so I don’t know how well it “precisely tracks essential data in real-time, including EEG brain signals, EOG eye movements, EMG facial muscle movements, SpO2, heart rate, and more.”
FRENZ looks like they are trying to be a high-end competitor to the popular $400 Muse, which has been around for a decade and had its own large booth at HTLH, where they are selling based on their “clinical grade output”. I hear mixed reviews about MUSE: although it clearly seems to be tracking brainwaves (and it’s fun to manipulate a dot on screen with your brain), it’ll be a while before new models are worthwhile for normal people.
The Wall Street Journal this week published a fairly positive review of several similar devices (read for free here)
I met many other interesting people at both conferences and hope to have more updates as I follow up.
More personal science links
Back in PSWeek240523 we mentioned testing water for contaminants and the project at plasticlist.org to crowdsource more information. A new review published in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology attempts to quantify this, concluding that about 25% of all chemicals in food packaging have been detected in human body tissue. I’m not going to get too paranoid, but at least I’ve stopped reheating anything in its original plastic container. It’s probably just fine, but the more I study this the more I’m impressed at how little anyone knows about the long-term effects.
I never understood the appeal of lab-grown meat, and a decade after the introduction of Impossible Foods and other “cultivated meat” products, now investors and industry insiders agree. A cow has always been the most efficient factory for making meat, literally synthesizing it for free from grass. I understand the ethical/moral arguments, but that has nothing to do with science. If you’re worried about the environmental impact, remember that modern farming makes full use of all the non-meat parts of the cow, so nothing is wasted. Meanwhile, who knows what the odd chemicals in the fake kind will do to you.
Supposedly one secret behind Elon Musk’s ability to shoot skyscrapers in the air and then catch them with chopsticks is his maniacal focus on basic laws of physics. Dynomight has two nice examples for how basic arithmetic can guide you the same way: it would take $500M to definitely show whether salt intake is bad, and how one approach to storing your household electricity overnight would require a $350K rock.
Mathematically, it’s irrational to think your one measly vote counts when it’s obvious no election will ever be decided by a single person. But that’s only true if everyone votes. Check https://votepower.us/ to see how effective your vote actually is in your state and county when you consider actual participation rates. For example, in the Seattle area my vote counts 1.3 times, because traditionally about 1/1.3 = 76% of people actually bother.
The FBI and biohackers: an unusual relationship Embro Reports describes how the FBI is tracking the self-trackers and biohackers. From April 2016 (via the Center for IP and Law). Richard Fuisz also wrote a summary article Caveat Creator, Journal of Law and the Biosciences.
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About Personal Science
Isn’t it curious that the people who seem most worried about “disinformation” are never concerned about their own beliefs, which presumably are true and accurate. Personal scientists, on the other hand, want to decide for ourselves, unfiltered by those who think they need to protect us from wrongthink.
But thinking for yourself isn’t easy. In a complicated world filled with contradictory advice from arrogant “experts” who often disagree with each other, finding clarity is hard. There may be no perfect solution, but we believe the scientific method offers a glimmer of hope. Be open-minded yet skeptical. Trust what you can measure and observe firsthand, and always be brutally honest in acknowledging that you are often the easiest person to fool.
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