Complaining about vague symptoms and then complaining about data collected with consumer devices is a little unfair IMO. We should be encouraging people with vague symptoms to collect more objective data!

There are of course drawbacks with consumer devices compared to medical equipment, but there are also a lot of medical issues that come and go, possibly with time of day effects or specific triggers. Using only a few brief snapshots that come from official doctor visits to draw any conclusion is a huge drawback of much of modern medicine, and biomedical research is slowly trending towards addressing this.

If one is careful in buying high quality consumer devices and doing some sanity checks with their data collection process I feel it can already be informative. It can be a great screener and guide people towards what type of specialist they should see.

For some tests there are "take home" medical versions that can get a more official (albeit still much briefer than personal equipment) dataset. However it can often be difficult to get a doctor to order based on vague symptoms, and it is non-ideal for patients to go on such a fishing expedition through official channels, especially the way medical billing/insurance works in the US.

I get there is concern about patients reading into the data too much, and yes there will be some people with psychiatric problems that could be enabled. But I think the benefits far outweigh the costs. In addition to early detection of issues in healthy people, it would also have a lot of upside for people with inexplicable chronic illness.

Yes people like that are vulnerable and will cling to things, but guess what - giving them a shitty label like Fibromyalgia only drives them to alternative medicine scams and toxic internet forums. It's human nature to look for alternatives when something has failed, and so why not at least channel that in to something potentially productive? In some cases they might even find a real diagnosis, but in general it could lead to actual research on these very poorly defined diseases.

I don't know anything about sick building syndrome so can't really comment on that, but assuming the person didn't lie that would be remarkably coincidental timing with the move in and move out dates. Perhaps the toxin they identified is irrelevant, but there sure does seem to be something odd going on while they lived in that apartment.

They also are clinically fine again now, so even if it was some weird psychological thing, moving out of the building fixed the problem and therefore the data lead her to the right "treatment".

I guess my point is that maybe you're right that this wasn't sick building syndrome, and maybe that makes this article a net negative, because it could lead others to look for that where it isn't. But another takeaway from the article is just the more abstract story about investigating your problems so that you're more equipped to handle them. There can be non-medical/low risk interventions or mitigating strategies, and even in this instance it did also drive her towards relevant doctors (although it's impossible to say whether she sought out legitimate doctors since there is probably a higher ratio of quacks specializing in environmental toxins)