Last week, Rochelle Sharpe from the New England Center for Investigative Reporting published an article in The Washington Post about the flimsy evidence base for most health apps you can purchase in the iTunes or Google Play Android online stores. Developers have been marketing such apps for years — most of them having no research to suggest they can do half the things they claim.
Worse yet, neither Apple nor Google appear to care. Neither company responded to Sharpe’s inquiries about why they allow apps to be sold on their storefronts that claim to treat all sorts of medical and mental health problems, without the research to back them up.
So what kinds of things can your smartphone cure or alleviate the symptoms of? You might be surprised at Sharpe’s findings.
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Two cents worth of gut reaction:
1) How do you spell ‘placebo’?
2) “A sucker is born every minute”, with someone out there willing to exploit it and the vulnerable &/or needy lined up to download it.
Not that the power of hope doesn’t drive miracles, and not to say that there aren’t some well-designed (and tested) ‘apps’ out there to help with self-management, access to tools or support.
Good article! I actually had no idea all these phone apps were out there. Obviously preying on the public. As for increasing breast size by listening to babies cry, well that’s absurd. As a cosmetic surgeon, I can vouch for that. There is, however, a phone app that is free and shows a woman how she would look with breast augmentation. It does not claim to cure anything though. Thanks for the information!
Dr Rhys Branman