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So you read: > Anyone trying to shickle a few dollars from the medical system to provide "pre-natal diagnosis" without sound science - they can come burn in th

So you read: > Anyone trying to shickle a few dollars from the medical system to provide "pre-natal diagnosis" without sound science - they can come burn in the same hell I live in every day. And didn't understand the failing? Really? > Anyone trying to shickle a few dollars from the medical system to provide "pre-natal diagnosis" without sound science I mean how much more obvious could they have made it? Do you just not understand why pedaling unsound prenatal tests is a failing?

OJFord 5y ago
Maybe it's because I'm not American and am pretty unfamiliar with that system, but yeah. To be clear I'm not disagreeing with OP or saying nobody else is to blame, I just didn't fully understand. I was glad someone else had asked and hoped to scroll down and understand, not find an argument, I think everyone had good intentions here.
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  It's not an American concept. Pre-natal diagnoses based on unsound science is a bad thing regardless of if money is involved. And bilking a medical system has nothing to do with if it's free or privatized. Even with free healthcare the suppliers are still getting paid somehow... so them providing an unsound test is still making unjust profit.
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    From what was described in the NYT article, the tests are not “unsound”. Nor are those making the tests inherently corrupt or malicious (some medical testing companies are, e.g. Theranos, but the same could be said of any other occupation or industry). My impression is that people who design these tests go into the field to help give parents the best possible information, and do their best to make tests which are as accurate as possible. (Disclaimer: I don’t know anyone in medical technology, pharmaceutical, etc. industries.) The tests are extremely good, but they are not perfect, with a specificity in the 99.9%–99.99% range, which is low enough that there are more false positives than true positives for extremely rare conditions. Making tests with specificity in the 99.999% range or beyond is an inherently extremely hard problem. The current quality would be fine if the posterior probabilities were properly explained to patients and if physicians had enough basic intro-level statistics background to interpret the test results. Unfortunately patients often aren’t given the results directly or told accurately how to interpret them and apparently many physicians lack basic statistical competence. It isn’t too promising that this NYT article expressly aimed at clearing up laypeople’s misconceptions does such a poor job explaining the subject, and spends its first half on misleading clickbait about how “wrong” the tests are.

OJFord 5y ago

Maybe it's because I'm not American and am pretty unfamiliar with that system, but yeah. To be clear I'm not disagreeing with OP or saying nobody else is to blame, I just didn't fully understand. I was glad someone else had asked and hoped to scroll down and understand, not find an argument, I think everyone had good intentions here.

BoorishBears 5y ago
It's not an American concept. Pre-natal diagnoses based on unsound science is a bad thing regardless of if money is involved. And bilking a medical system has nothing to do with if it's free or privatized. Even with free healthcare the suppliers are still getting paid somehow... so them providing an unsound test is still making unjust profit.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  From what was described in the NYT article, the tests are not “unsound”. Nor are those making the tests inherently corrupt or malicious (some medical testing companies are, e.g. Theranos, but the same could be said of any other occupation or industry). My impression is that people who design these tests go into the field to help give parents the best possible information, and do their best to make tests which are as accurate as possible. (Disclaimer: I don’t know anyone in medical technology, pharmaceutical, etc. industries.) The tests are extremely good, but they are not perfect, with a specificity in the 99.9%–99.99% range, which is low enough that there are more false positives than true positives for extremely rare conditions. Making tests with specificity in the 99.999% range or beyond is an inherently extremely hard problem. The current quality would be fine if the posterior probabilities were properly explained to patients and if physicians had enough basic intro-level statistics background to interpret the test results. Unfortunately patients often aren’t given the results directly or told accurately how to interpret them and apparently many physicians lack basic statistical competence. It isn’t too promising that this NYT article expressly aimed at clearing up laypeople’s misconceptions does such a poor job explaining the subject, and spends its first half on misleading clickbait about how “wrong” the tests are.