Woman Says She May Not Have Realized She Had Cancer If It Wasn’t For Her Oura Ring
A simple tracking device may have saved her life.
fizkes | Shutterstock As health tracking technology advances, people are learning more and more about their own personal medical situations. For one woman, this might just have been life-saving. The woman said her smart jewelry, the Oura Ring, helped her recognize unusual symptoms that prompted her to get tested. It turned out she had cancer and thanks to her Oura Ring it was caught early.
A woman revealed that her Oura Ring was responsible for her cancer diagnosis.
A TikTok content creator and aesthetic nurse practitioner named Anna Gooding shared her story of how her Oura Ring alerted her that she had cancer before it was even diagnosed by a doctor.
“I knew that I had cancer before I was diagnosed because of my Oura Ring,” she shared. “I religiously wear my Oura Ring. I came home from a trip, started having night sweats, was super fatigued. I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what it was, so I kind of ignored it.”
“But every day, my Oura Ring on my app would look like this,” she said, showing a screenshot from her app. “I had major signs almost every single day.”
The woman said her Oura Ring kept indicating that her symptoms of fatigue were not normal.
Under a heading that read “major signs” the app said, “Your biometrics show major signs of something straining your body. Take extra care today and rest if you’re feeling low on energy.”
She continued, “My readiness score was always like, 30s, 40s. No bueno.” According to Oura’s website, the readiness score is designed to show users how prepared their body is for the day ahead. It ranges from 0 to 100, and 85 or above is considered “optimal.” Gooding said, “One thing about the Oura Ring is it tracks your basal body temp, um, and it uses that information to help track your cycles,. Um, but it’s nice, because it can also kind of give you a heads up of when you’re getting sick.”
“So, for reference, this is kind of what my body temp would look like, um, about, like, a couple of months before I started having symptoms,” she said gesturing to the screenshot she had displayed. “And then you can see here, when I started having the night sweats and fevers and everything, like, my temp was spiking as high as, like, 2.7 above my baseline.”
“And you can see that mine was pretty consistently high,” she said as she shared a screenshot that showed temperatures at a much higher rate than what she offered as her average. “And usually there are a lot of dips or elevations just based on what phase you’re in of your cycle,” she said. But for her, her temperature stayed consistently high.
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The Oura Ring is really quite remarkable.
In addition to giving you a readiness score each day, the Oura Ring claims to track 20 different biometrics throughout the day and night. It keeps tabs on other important things like your sleep and movement.
It is basically an Apple Watch or Fitbit in ring form, which for some may be more convenient. Then again, for others, a ring could be less comfortable.
While the woman's cancer would have been detected and diagnosed eventually, it’s very possible that her Oura Ring went a long way towards aiding in her recovery.
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At some point, Gooding would have learned that she had cancer with or without the Oura Ring, especially as a nurse practitioner. But that could have taken weeks or even months longer. It’s impossible to say whether or not her Oura Ring saved her life, but it certainly seems like it helped.
“If I didn’t have the Oura Ring, I’m sure I would have figured it out eventually,” she affirmed. “But having this information, like, laid out in front of me definitely made me take it more seriously. Because if you’re a nurse, you know we’re not running to the doctor for any little thing.”
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.