Wealth and power are no longer conditions of having doctors in your back pocket. These days, all it takes is a smartphone.

There are now more than 2,000 mobile health applications available for download, allowing patients and doctors alike to monitor medications, manage disease, facilitate remote monitoring, and even track labour contractions, all using only a phone. But even as medical professionals praise certain apps for reducing pressure on the health-care system, concerns remain about the absence of regulation and potential for misuse.

“Anybody and their dog can make a medical app, so it’s really important to research the companies behind these things,” says Candice Volney, a nurse from Edmonton. “Some of the diagnoses that come up when people enter their symptoms can be scary, and very deceiving.”

Dr. Turi McNamee, an associate professor at the University of South Dakota’s Sanford School of Medicine, says she relies so heavily on medical apps that she’d feel naked practicing without them.

“I can look up doses of medications, costs, alternative medications for a variety of conditions, and can perform a number of medical calculations without leaving the patient’s bedside,” says McNamee.

“The downside . . . is that they’re full of disclaimers with regards to their accuracy. In theory, if I give a patient the wrong dosage of a medication based on information obtained from an app, the maker of the app would seem to bear no liability whatsoever.”

Scientific American reports that the Food and Drug Administration is weighting regulatory options, though a spokesperson for the U.S. agency would say only that their role in this regard is evolving.

Laypeople who use medical apps face less dramatic risks but nonetheless leave themselves open to anxiety and misdiagnosis – not unlike what occurs when people seek health information on the Internet, which 70 per cent of online Canadians, age 16 and older, have done.

In entering such symptoms as foot pain and cramping into a free WebMD app, for example, the phone-based program returns such possibilities as fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, peripheral neuropathy, Lyme disease and anemia.

The University of Regina’s Kristi Wright, citing data from the Canadian Psychological Association, notes that up to 30 per cent of the population experiences intermittent or mild health-related fears, shown to increase reassurance-seeking about symptoms from friends, family, physicians and, more recently, mobile medical apps.

“Access to health information at the touch of a finger represents a technological advance leading to efficient health-care service provision for some,” says Wright, an assistant professor of psychology. “(But) for others, it may serve as a catalyst for continued disability and dysfunction.”

One thing is certain: with eight in 10 doctors expected to have smartphones by the end of this year, the issue isn’t going away.

Dr. Antonia Arnaert, an expert on e-health technologies, says people simply need to be careful about the types of mobile tools they use. In her own research, for example, she recommends patients rely only on the apps that she and her team have vetted.

At present, Arnaert uses medical apps – with the mobile devices provided to patients before they leave the hospital – to help manage people’s diabetes, hypertension and other chronic conditions, as well as provide support for palliative and oncology patients and post-operative care. By having nurses monitor symptoms and conditions remotely, she says hospital beds are freed up and emergency rooms are less crowded.

“It gives patients a kind of control over their disease, and helps them take better care of themselves at home,” says Arnaert, an associate professor at McGill University’s School of Nursing. “It’s developing into a whole new way of health-care delivery.”

(Read More: Vancouver Sun / YWN-112)