Oura ring and the price of under-researching women's health

[StickItInTheFamilyAlbum]

This is a good summary of the position some women are in when they need reassurance around particular issues. I'm pleased this has been so useful for Smith Galer. I share her concerns about the trade-off she had to make about her medical privacy and the reality that many women could afford neither the ring nor the monthly subscription.

SG wove in the reality of the under-researched women's health issues. This connects to other threads about women's health in FWR at present. I'm also interested in this being headlined as "where the NHS has failed" as it may say something interesting about expectations of what the NHS can provide.

I now feel 10 times better about my personal health because I had the disposable income to secure better information than I’d have been able to achieve going through the nation’s healthcare system; anyone who doesn’t have hundreds of pounds to spare simply cannot find the same relief as quickly or at all.
To get such information, I also had to be happy sharing private healthcare information with a tech company. I currently feel like this is an easy decision to make, given reproductive rights and freedoms in the UK are, generally speaking, a lot better than in other countries.
I welcome a growth in healthtech and made the decision this year that having more information about my body currently overrides my worries about sharing the data with companies in the first place. As a woman, I have an under-researched body – even though one in three women in the UK will suffer from a reproductive or gynaecological health issue in their lives, less than 2.5 per cent of publicly funded research is dedicated solely to reproductive health. I crave any information on it that I can get. This is also behind my decision to buy an Oura ring, a piece of smart jewellery that tracks my sleep and movement.

https://inews.co.uk/opinion/trust-oura-ring-more-doctor-3226588?

NHS have been completely and utterly useless with my PCOS.

I went private, got on Metformin, got a nutritionist, and bought an Oura ring with the Natural Cycles plugin. I would recommend anyone to do the same.

I've heard several positive reports from people with PCOS. Is Natural Cycles included into the standard monthly fee or is it an add-on?

I wonder how long it's going to take before the NHS accepts that there has to be a profound shift in what younger people expect from a health service if they are to be supported in managing their health (and dimensions such as fertility) successfully.

I can't work out what it actually does?

I track using fitr woman app which is free and has exercise and nutrition advice plus recipes.

Ok after googling I found this and can see that it would definitely be helpful for me. I'm on tamoxifen and trying to exercise but balancing rest and recovery against the side effects and perimenopause stuff is challenging sometimes. It wouldn't benefit my bank account though.

www.womenshealthmag.com/uk/fitness/workouts/a43260292/oura-ring-review/

I agree - I think lack of research into women’s health is terrible and needs to be addressed. But I don’t think article goes any way to demonstrating that.

She had some bloods done that her NHS GP would not have done - but then seems to say that they gave her peace of mind that nothing was wrong. So actually it changed nothing and I’d argue the NHS had no reason to do them. It doesn’t say it explained why she had irregular periods, only that the tests that were done did not show anything (and I bet another company would willingly sell her another set of tests).

She says it gives data about sleep and exercise - like many activity trackers available to men and women already.

I actually thought this was a terrible article and just showed it to be a gimmick.

It reads a little like an advertisement tbh

So actually it changed nothing and I’d argue the NHS had no reason to do them.

A fair number of referrals and procedures change nothing. I don't remember if the threshold for a GP referral to the 2 week cancer pathway is 3 or 5% but the expectation (and hope) is that most of those tests will lead to reassurance rather than an alarming diagnosis.

Is your specific objection that it relates to reassuring someone about her fertility which isn't necessarily a health condition (certainly pre-diagnosis)? A similar argument was used about early stage pregnancy tests and even ante-natal care such as scans as both were notionally being used in healthy populations and were relatively costly. Both are standard now as the supporting technology is cheaper, evidence and expectations have changed.

Default expectations around fertility have changed and this has lead to women seeking reassurance beyond that which the NHS provides. I'm interested in whether this is a generational shift in expectations that reflects environmental and social circumstances.

I don't know what the comparisons are to other fitness trackers and the add-ons that are available for those.

I know that the NHS is currently looking at a demand for a 50% increase in care and procedures by 2030 because of the number of people over the age of 65. That underpins some of the push towards self-monitoring and preserving health or the self-management of existing conditions.

Looking at NICE's medical devices activities, there is a substantial push towards the use of devices and apps across a range of conditions to reduce the need for F2F NHS contact. Given women's already unsatisfactory experience of healthcare in some areas, this is a space that I'm watching.