Broadcast as part of a special evening “The new world of health” on April 26 on Arte, the documentary “Your health, a coveted treasure” shows how the giants of the Web are positioning themselves in the global medical sector.
While the public and private health systems are at the end of their tether, the constellation of companies called GAFAM – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft – are investing part of their colossal profits in medicine and/or research. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, aim to “cure and eliminate all diseases by the end of the century”, through the actions of their foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Google is currently developing an artificial intelligence capable of competing with the best practitioners. Apple offers a range of connected objects that monitor our state of health. Amazon, through the company Amazon Care, invested heavily in the telemedicine and mutual insurance markets. And they are not the only ones setting out to conquer a market considered “the new black gold”, based on the exploitation of health data which, according to them, will make it possible to improve care, reduce costs , and prevent disease.
Benefits and limits
But are we sure we want to entrust the history of our care to these private companies whose main objective remains to enrich themselves? If the European Union continues to regulate the confidentiality of personal data, their management has been entrusted to private companies in the United States and the United Kingdom after the signing of lucrative contracts.
David Carr-Brown’s documentary thus makes it possible to understand where these companies are in their – apparently inevitable – advances in the health sector, raises the question of the general interest and equality in the face of care, potential ethical problems that this trend – if it is imposed on the greatest number – raises, the benefits that exist in the development of these methods, and their limits, but also the alternatives that exist and which seek to move in the direction of a global management and health humanist.
The documentary will be broadcast on April 26 at 10:25 p.m. on Arte, and will be available from April 19 to August 23 on the arte.tv website.