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My billion dollar business idea
- steve_mobs 17y agoIkea is a great idea. Sell artistic looking pieces of furniture that cost crap to produce. why buy a frank wright designed chair for thousands of dollars when you can buy a similar chair for a hundred and no one will even know.
- Tichy 17y agoFor me a business idea also encompasses the possible path to getting traction. "If we had x and Walmart would sell it, we would make billions" does not count - is has to include "Walmart will sell it because".
- jacquesm 17y agoPlacebos are already routinely prescribed by doctors. As usual with any good idea people have had it before you did.
- ryandvm 17y agoReally? Not that I doubt the placebo effect, but in today's litigious climate, I'd be very surprised if modern doctors were actually engaging in the necessary equivocation to produce the placebo effect. My take on modern medicine is that most doctors in the U.S. are pretty much limited to cover-your-ass medicine. That is, ordering unnecessary tests and writing unnecessary prescriptions.
- willwagner 17y agoI imagine that some prescriptions for antibiotics by doctors are more or less because the doctor doubts it calls for antibiotics but rationalizes that the placebo effect will help, coupled with patient's angst that they may leave the doctor's office empty-handed.
- jacquesm 17y agoAnti-biotics are not prescribed unless there is some need for them because there are serious detrimental side effects of using anti-biotics when they are not strictly speaking required. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_resistance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_resistance
- ryandvm 17y agoFrom your replies, it's pretty clear that you're not familiar with medicine in the United States. Antibiotics are frequently prescribed without necessity by doctors that would rather have a happy (and continuing) customer than lose a client for doing the right thing.
- jacquesm 17y agoThat's extremely irresponsible of them. This is what was probably a direct consequence of such behaviour (it started in the UK and has since spread worldwide): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylococcus_aureus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphyloc... As for me not being familiar with medicine in the US, you are correct, I have lived in Canada and currently live in Europe.
- tedunangst 17y agoTetracycline is routinely prescribed for acne, which isn't much of a need, strictly speaking.
- jacquesm 17y agoTwo things, one: the world is a lot larger than just the US. Two: doctors aren't going to go out of their way to tell their patients they just got some compressed sugar because that would take away the effect. There is a class of patients that will run to the GP every chance they get and they won't leave until the doctor 'has done something' which translates in to 'had prescribed them some medicine'. In these cases doctors prescribe placebos without any qualms at all, and to the happiness of both the patient (the placebo works!), insurance company (they're cheap) and the GP (patient leaves them alone).
- ced 17y agoThere was a TED talk by an Indian neurologist who said that placebo works even if you don't believe in it.
- mixmax 17y agoI have a billion dollar idea: Start a grocery store. Seriously. When you have enough money start another. Keep going until you have thousands. It can't fail. Another billion dollar idea: Start selling well designed Scandinavian furniture really cheap. Build a few megastores around the world, and make sure to squeeze your suppliers to keep prices down. These two amazing ideas made Sam Walton and Ingvar Kamprad billionaires. Execution you say? Nah, these ideas are so obviously amazing that they've probably spent most of their time in business fending off blonde playmates while drinking martinis at the beach.
- kevinholesh 17y agoIdeas are nothing without actually making it happen, even the really great ones. If it were as easy as just coming up with the idea, everyone would do it.
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago> Start a grocery store. Seriously. WalMart's big innovation was to apply sophisticated, dynamic just-in-time production methods to its product distribution system, cutting out both inventory costs and out-of-stock sales losses. The efficiencies from JIT logistics allowed the company to grow big enough that it could dictate prices to suppliers, driving competitors out of business and further locking in its monopoly in discount retail.
- tptacek 17y agoWalmart has been a huge company since, I don't know, I did a report on their stock in grammar school in the '80s. Is it really the case that sophisticated/JIT/dynamic/etc has always been their key differentiator? Not arguing, just asking.
- grinich 17y agoNo, but it's been key in keeping them at the top.
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago
- zedwill 17y agoIt is already done. It is called Homeopathy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy ;-)
- aaronblohowiak 17y agohe makes this joke in the article
- igorhvr 17y agoIt is not a joke. Homeopathy is the billion-dollar business he is talking about.
- bensummers 17y agoObligatory link to That Mitchell and Webb Look: Homeopathic A&E http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0
- pbhjpbhj 17y agoSurely not sugar pills, it's got to taste horrible, good medicines don't taste nice! Perhaps sugar pills but coated with bitrex ...?
- ramanujan 17y agoThe Placebo effect was debunked in the New England Journal of Medicine several years ago. When you do studies that track three groups -- treatment, placebo, and no intervention -- the placebo resembles the no intervention group. People just tend to get better when they get sick and that is conflated with a placebo effect. Google "placebo nejm" for details.
- ektimo 17y agoObecalp ("placebo" backwards) will be available for purchase from http://inventedbyamother.com/ http://inventedbyamother.com/