Date:2 December 2025
Treść Sekcje
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What happens when huge health databases link directly to your digital ID?
In this short video Rob Verkerk PhD explores the privacy issues behind the UK’s Our Future Health study, its early findings on autoimmune conditions and mental health, and why natural, lifestyle-based solutions are being sidelined in favour of pharmaceutical interventions. Rob also unpacks why de-identified data isn’t the same as anonymous data.
Forewarned is forearmed.
Transkrypt
Hi there. Rob Verkerk here.
Are you concerned about digital IDs? I certainly am, and many of us are.
The problem isn’t so much the use of facial recognition or a signature to identify us when we want to, say, move around. That’s something we’ve been doing for years with passports. The problem occurs when you start linking health data with your own identity or financial data, in fact, all of it together. That’s exactly why so many of us are concerned. So this raises the question of what happens when you see very large big data studies being done?
Are the data anonymised or not? And there’s a huge study going on in the UK at the moment, Our Future Health. You can have a look at the website. And we’ve been tracking into how the data are being used, and it’s very clear they are not anonymised. They are often de-identified. So many of the researchers within our future health can’t find and track individuals, but there are individuals within. There’s a small number of individuals who hold the key to be able to re-identify, relink those data, because they are also being linked with NHS data.
Now, the study itself is pretty interesting. The first publication in BMJ Mental Health has been specifically Particularly looking at the relationship between autoimmune conditions and mental health problems, and it’s shown a very clear link. This is not a great surprise, shouldn’t be a great surprise to anyone, but it shows basically If you have an autoimmune condition, you’re probably more than two times as likely to have a mental health issue, particularly looking at depression and anxiety. But the problem is, at the moment, there are one and a half million people in this study, but they’re still recruiting and they want five million. Now, this is a very large representation of people. Of course, the difficulty is when these data go out into the wider environment, how they get used. Another big problem is it’s being done with the view that, specifically in relation to autoimmune conditions and mental health problems, is that new treatment modalities will be found. The thing I find fascinating about it is we see this complete inability to look at what nature can provide, how we can actually deal with many of these conditions without using drugs at all. The difficulty with studies like this, it all feeds directly into the drug companies who are looking at ways of, for example, blocking specific cytokines, pro-inflammatory cytokines, to be able to reduce the risk.
Whereas what we know is that many natural antioxidants, building your glutathione reserves, even managing your uric acid levels, these are all things that we can do with our diet and our lifestyle. These are not part of the programme. I want to issue a warning here that we need to be very, very careful about how we consent into studies like this because it is part of a big picture that is directly linked to our digital ID in the UK, NHS data. And we are all, I think, very concerned about how these data may be used in the future to essentially control us. And of course, the real solutions that many of us in the natural health world are looking for are never going to be provided by studies like this. There will be pharmaceuticals that are looking at interfering with inflammatory processes rather than using nature, the very best way of trying to get inflammation under control, as well as dealing with autoimmune conditions that are nearly always associated with a specific trigger or trauma, inflammation, because most people are consuming diets and living lifestyles that push us into this perennial state of low-grade inflammation.
They’re also linked to leaky barriers, so leaky gut barriers, where we lose permeability because we’re being exposed to toxins and allergens all the time. Gluten is a classic example of that, but also a leaky blood-brain barrier. In fact, very interesting, when we look at, say, even mRNA technologies, there is almost clear It’s clear evidence now that mRNA vaccines push us into a pro-inflammatory profile. So very hard to see that solutions are going to be delivered. And in fact, what these kinds of studies, like Our Future Health does is open up a can of worms that brings health data directly together with digital IDs. So beware. Think very carefully if you’re consenting into a study like this. Thank you very much for listening.
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