Is More Data About Your Body Actually Good for You?

身体数据越多,真的对你有益吗?

The Opinions

2026-07-29

37 分钟
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Americans have spent billions of dollars tracking themselves: their steps, their blood oxygen saturation, their sleep cycles, their glucose levels. Is any of this data making us healthier? That’s the question the Opinion writer David Wallace-Wells poses to Dr. Rachael Bedard, an Opinion contributor and primary care doctor. In this episode, they explore what tracking ourselves, versus the population at large, can teach us and our doctors, and whether artificial intelligence might one day make sense of all of this data. Thoughts? Email us at theopinions@nytimes.com. This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Video editing by Brandon Belk-Yee and Julian Hackney. The postproduction manager is Mike Puretz. Original music by Isaac Jones. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Video is Jonah M. Kessel. The deputy director of Opinion Shows is Alison Bruzek. The director of Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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  • So, Rachel, a little while ago, you got into a little spat online.

  • Tell me what that was about.

  • Yeah, so a few weeks ago, a startup in San Francisco announced

  • that it was going to launch a new product, which is a whole body imaging technique.

  • And it led to this really interesting...

  • Kind of nasty discourse between medical doctors like me and folks in tech.

  • And that sort of conversation came down to doctors

  • being very wary that this kind of data can sometimes cause more harm than good.

  • And folks on the tech side saying basically, how can more data ever be bad?

  • Isn't more data always helpful in informing?

  • Decisions, research, etc., etc.

  • And it led to this conversation between you and I, actually, about is more data about your body always good?