A month ago we wrote that Oura had built something Apple and Samsung couldn't copy: a real doctor, wired into the app at the end of your health data.

Oura went further, launching a partnership with Counsel Health next week on June 16 that lets members in 43 US states message a real doctor directly from the app. Now Whoop is following. Starting this summer in the US, members can book an on-demand video visit with a licensed doctor straight from the app, and that doctor walks in already holding months of your body data, plus your bloodwork and medical history synced through a records company called HealthEx.

Some doctors are skeptical.

This week STAT, a health-news outlet read across medicine, reminded everyone that the bar for using data to make a medical decision is far higher than the bar for a wellness tip, and wearables mostly haven't cleared it. The FDA has approved only a handful of wearable features for real clinical use. UW Medicine ran a whole piece on the question in its title: "Do Wearables Make You Healthier or Just More Anxious?"

Dr. Cindy Lin, a sports medicine professor there, put it bluntly: "the fancier the number, the more skeptical you should be of its reliability alone."

"the fancier the number, the more skeptical you should be of its reliability alone."

Her colleague Dr. Jordan Prutkin, who runs the UW Heart Institute, was harder on the daily scores these apps sell, calling them "just algorithms made up by the companies" that "don't have a lot of data behind them."

A ring or wrist band that says "your temperature is up" is a useful feature. But a system a doctor uses to write a prescription is regulated medicine, with licensing rules, prescribing law, and a standard of proof a wellness score never had to meet. Whoop hasn't said what it will charge or which conditions it covers, and says these visits add to your regular doctor instead of replacing one. If that's the case, how useful they really are comes into question.

Apple is approaching it cautiously and isn't trying to play doctor-matchmaker, yet. The Apple Watch spots a problem and tells you to see your own doctor. The hypertension alerts the FDA cleared last fall flag 30 days of data and tell you to confirm with a real cuff. The ECG app has caught signs of AFib since 2018. Each feature went through full FDA review, and the hypertension tool alone was trained on more than 100,000 people. Oura and Whoop hold no FDA clearances of their own — Oura borrows one through a birth-control app partnership, and Whoop already has a warning letter from the FDA saying its blood-pressure feature was a medical device being sold without clearance. Whoop pushed back the next day, calling it wellness, not medicine.

Medical testing takes years, and both sides will likely get there in the end. Apple started with the clearances and are worrying about the doctor later; Oura and Whoop started with the doctor and are working on the clearances.

Being connected to a doctor and being trusted by one are not the same thing. The wearable is still working on the second part. We'll be watching how this plays out.