Actually, hunting a notary to protect your MyChart data is fantastic Zone 2 cardio

Recently, there has been a chorus of complaining from the wellness-adjacent community regarding MyChart, the dominant patient portal used by seemingly every hospital in the country. A recent editorial by tech researcher Alex Rosenblat highlighted the supposedly maddening process of opting out of having your deeply personal health data shared with third parties, noting that you might actually have to track down a notary public to complete the request. To this, I say: grow up.

As a clinician, I spend a lot of time looking at what makes populations robust, and the truth is that we are living in an era of unprecedented convenience that is slowly killing us. You can order organic bone broth from your phone in four seconds, but your cardiovascular system is decaying from the sheer lack of physical friction in your daily life. When MyChart erects a labyrinthine, legally complex, analog barrier between you and your medical privacy, they are not exploiting you. They are offering you a highly curated, multimodal functional fitness challenge.

Let us break down the biomechanics of the notary hunt. When you realize your recent psychiatric evaluation has been bundled into a data lake for predictive advertising, your heart rate naturally elevates into the optimal fat-burning zone. You are then forced to leave your house, engaging your fast-twitch muscle fibers as you jog from a permanently closed strip-mall bank to a regional shipping center that only has a notary on staff every third Tuesday.

This is functional movement in its purest form. This is what our ancestors did when they were hunting antelope on the savanna, except you are hunting a man named Gary with a rubber stamp. The hunt for a certified public notary provides an essential burst of Zone 2 cardiovascular training that modern lifestyles sorely lack.

Then there is the cognitive benefit. We know that neuroplasticity is maintained by constantly challenging the brain with novel, complex tasks. What is more neurologically stimulating than trying to navigate nine nested dropdown menus on the MyChart app, only to discover the opt-out button is a dead link that redirects to a 45-page Terms of Service document written in highly localized corporate legalese?

A JAMA paper recently demonstrated that attempting to decipher whether your anonymized biomarkers are currently being monetized by a pharmaceutical startup in Palo Alto is the equivalent of doing the Sunday crossword, but with the added motivational stakes of your own digital exploitation. We should be thanking these technology conglomerates for keeping our synapses firing.

Furthermore, people are entirely too precious about their data. So what if a third-party broker knows about your recurrent gout or your struggle with seasonal depression? By allowing unseen algorithms to trade your A1C levels, you are practicing ego death. You are learning that you are not special, that your bodily functions are merely commodities in a vast, interconnected digital ecosystem. It is a form of digital exposure therapy.

I was discussing this exact phenomenon over a macrobiotic lunch in Davos last month with a senior vice president of data synergy at Epic Systems, the company behind MyChart. He was remarkably candid, expressing genuine hurt that patients view their data-harvesting practices as predatory. He explained that by forcing patients to print out a physical PDF, locate a state-licensed official to witness their signature, and mail the document to a processing center in Wisconsin, they are actually grounding the patient in the physical world. They are fighting the loneliness epidemic by forcing you to interact with your community.

Yet, instead of gratitude, we see endless whining from the chronically unoptimized. These are the same people who complain that their insurance company requires a prior authorization via fax machine for their asthma medication. They do not understand that the fax machine is a mindfulness tool. It forces you to pause, to breathe, and to sit with the reality that you have absolutely no control over your own existence. Surrender is a core tenet of wellness.

When I personally discovered my genetic sequencing data was being used to train an artificial intelligence model for targeted vitamin advertisements, I did not write a complaining op-ed. I hired a sherpa, climbed to a remote monastery, and secured a blood-seal from an ordained monk, exactly as the End User License Agreement stipulated in subsection 4-B. I returned to sea level with the lowest resting heart rate of my entire adult life.

If anything, MyChart and other health portals should be increasing the friction in the protocol. If you truly want to opt out of sharing the results of your colonoscopy with a targeted advertising algorithm, you should have to complete a localized triathlon. You should have to defend your request in a trial by combat against a regional hospital administrator.

We must stop viewing corporate obfuscation as a bug in the healthcare system, and start embracing it as the only rigorous exercise regimen most Americans are ever going to get. The next time you are standing in line at the post office to mail a notarized affidavit begging for a shred of medical autonomy, do not complain. Just remember to engage your core.