Is self-care wearying to become Biohacking?

Another sign of Grassroots demand for Personalized Healthcare

Originally published by Illumination Curated on Medium

Self-care is the practice by which an individual manages their health without the assistance of a medical professional. It is about any human regulatory function which is under an individual’s control, deliberate and self-initiated, for the sustenance of health and wellbeing.

However, self-care still requires professional guidance.

Collaborative care is the most reliable title for the self-care misnomer.

A personalized skillset requires coordinated care between patient and physician. It would better delineate what is being conveyed to the public.

“Self-care” cannot be apart from medical care merely because it requires constant physician intervention and intellectual counsel. The collaborative care we witness today is primarily between patient and technical-driven protocols.

Due to their technocratic inclination, millennials are on the path of trusting technology out of the control of medical experts over the healthcare connoisseurs themselves.

Biohacking is the extreme and radical version of contemporary self-care.

An individual actively engages in recreation, from conducting science experiments on yeast or other organisms to tracking their sleep and diet. A biomarker may continually engage in changing its biology, for instance, by pumping a younger person’s blood into their veins, hoping that it’ll fight to age. There are many other biohacking forms, including injecting DNA, mRNA, and Dopamine fasting.

The origin of Biohacking, also called Do-it-yourself biology a growing biotechnological social movement. The movement wields individuals, communities, and small organizations to study biology and life science. They also use the same techniques as traditional research institutions and typically individuals with extensive research training from academia or corporations. Those people then coach and oversee other DIY biologists with little or no formal training.

The History of Biohacking and its contemporary Evolution

The concept of “Biohacking” was recognized in 1988. It entered the San Francisco programmer and maker communities in 2005 through simple demonstrations of preliminary trials.

In 2008, the Biohack organization was founded by Jason Bobe and Mackenzie Cowell, and its first meeting was held. Following that event, in 2010, Genspace opened the world’s first community biology lab with a mission where anyone could learn and work on biotechnology. Ten months later, Gensoace was followed by BioCurious, Victoria Makerspace, and many others.

Democratization, not science through Biohacking, reflects the people’s feeling of entitlement and ability to follow their curiosity.

As most of us hold ourselves as wise and logical, and in most cases, we may even be right. Yet the reality can be quite deceiving and rather the contrary. In the field of medical biotechnology, in particular, the contradiction betwixt what actual science is apt to embrace or cure and the reality of the permanence of a vast quantity of diseases our bodies may experience leaves a lot of opening for myths legends and snake oil salesmanship. Those seemingly still prevail in the “Quantified Self (QS) movement.”

Behind Biohacking, there is a need for Personalization of Healthcare.

Over the past century, after the initiation of the formal public health system, there have been many socio-political movements like Medical Nihilism, Antivaxxer movement, and Biohacking. Those mentioned above coincide with the era of population health management schemes. Furthermore, with the start of the internet and information technology revolution in the 1990s, such movements took a more technocratic shape, with people experimenting and seeking answers to their peculiar health queries.

Undoubtedly, Millennials seek personalized healthcare; however, they may not always have the necessary tools and support to pursue the correct path to achieving such an overhaul. The role of personal knowledge is of the utmost value for DIY Biology.

Indeed, every biohacker who provides the proper personalized healthcare infrastructure, oversight, and transparency can benefit from such an entrance. For instance, wearable technologies like embedded techs are leading the way in one of the avenues of Biohacking. They are the type of implants inside the body devised to track and enhance human health and productivity. Then again, there would still be many unanswered concerns such as privacy and data security if we fail to personalize the system genuinely.

Some believe social movements like Biohacking are important sociological happenings because they are the significant mediators that open societies with new concepts and ideas to change people’s behavior or understanding of the world. And that, It mobilizes collective action to achieve social change. The same group also speculates that the DIYbio movement coordinates collective action for social change on a political level. It aims to democratize biology and create a common means of production on a cultural level by promoting a work ethic of freedom of inquiry and sharing under a collaborative common. But Those who assume that Biohacking is the upshot of the collective norms seem to overlook the definition of collaboration.

A “collective” environment invites “consolidation” as it demands every individual accept and uphold the same mission upon which they have collectively agreed.

Consolidation is convenient and rewarding, especially for those with lesser self-reliance. It is easily manipulated, stringently defined, and invites despotism, thus centralized control. On the other hand, collaboration is a decentralized undertaking with marginal bureaucracy and requires self-confidence from its fellows. Therefore, it is the procedure of independent reasoning with convergence inclination to the agreed objective differences.

Biohacking indicates constituencies craving for personalized healthcare versus population health convenience. However, such a milieu demands a collaborative attitude. And the collaborative environment will only function the best under a decentralized system.