3 ms·
> If someone said to me we can now do the same old blood tests faster and cheaper, I would say that this is going to have very little impact on people's health.
by tel 12y ago
> If someone said to me we can now do the same old blood tests faster and cheaper, I would say that this is going to have very little impact on people's health. None of these tests are truly useful in prevention or screening unselected patients.
Are you kidding? I'm not completely familiar here, but I'd love to see a comparison of the current SOC for time between measurements of each of these endpoints and then a clinical judgement that genuinely nothing interesting happens in these levels at timeframes shorter than SOC.
A person I'm familiar with has a severe endocrine disorder which has eliminated nearly all of his natural hormone production. Instead, he must self-administer all hormones in proper dosages. In order to survive this way he has become vastly more familiar with his own blood panel than most human beings ever would dare. On insurance dime he takes far more regular blood tests than you usually can get access to and understands, even very roughly, how events in his life, diet, exercise, stress, weather, etc begin to affect his blood chemistry and, subsequently, his life. In his, of course anecdotal, experience these are things that he cannot converse with doctors about because they're not able to speak confidently so far outside of SOC. It's not necessarily surprising stuff, but there's comparatively little real-world evidence to give it a bite.
Theranos could make similar analyses achievable for far more people. It opens an entirely new branch of clinical research---blood chemistry fluctuation at the level of perhaps up to multiple times per day over months at a reasonable cost in both testing and human time (given adequate distribution---Walgreens or, even, eventually, a home edition). You can't pretend that Phizer and GSK, known partners, aren't all about that.
> Exciting for investors I guess, but for patients or healthcare workers probably not so much.
Only if you assume SOC doesn't change under the influence of massively more available quantitative data.
- streptomycin 12y ago> A person I'm familiar with has a severe endocrine disorder He said "unselected patients". The point is, some random guy with no preexisting condition might not actually benefit from being able to measure shit in his blood more easily. It could mostly lead to false positives, stress, and unnecessary costs. The only way to know for sure would be to do a study on it... but Theranos doesn't seem to like doing studies. Making blood tests faster and cheaper would definitely be a good thing, but it's possibly not a completely transformative thing.
- tel 12y agoI am not claiming that any individual will receive personal benefit from their own use of Theranos, but instead that large scale clinical researchers will.
- Gatsky 12y agoI am assuming that SOC won't change under the influence of massively more available quantitative data, or at least any gains would be both slight and only applicable to a very small number of people. I think it is probably a misconception that humans are simple enough that measuring something (on Theranos' current testing panel) which is produced in ten different ways in five different organs from millions of cells and then diluted in 7 litres of blood is going to tell you anything revolutionary. Certainly happy to be proven wrong, but there is a risk of harming people (financially, psychologically and perhaps medically) if you convince them that relentless tracking of their serum sodium tells them something useful.
- tel 12y agoI think the difference here comes in use. I agree that misinforming people about the meaningfulness of their blood chemistry is dangerous and low value. My target users are not Quantified Selfers (although my anecdote example might have thrown that off) but instead large scale clinical research sponsors.