Theranos Founder Faces a Test of Technology, and Reputation
There is so much ... hype around this technology. But some of their use cases aren&#x27;t all that useful, and their technology (while supposing to be cheaper) is often done on handheld units at the moment in isolated regions.<p>Let me explain:<p><i>Use cases outlined in this article that have minimal real medical benefit, but sound great:</i><p>- Home blood testing (why? there are only 2 types of people who may find this useful: patients on Warfarin, and patients on dialysis. Dialysis patients (if not on home dialysis) get tested 3 times a week when they go to dialysis. INR is usually stable once established, ceteris paribus)<p>- Field blood testing (Mostly pointless. Clinical signs are much more useful in a casualty situation. Arterial blood gasses are useful in resus rooms in emergency departments but in the field you want to keep them breathing, not go reversing exotic blood gas abnormalities)<p>For the majority of tests (EUC, CMP, LFT, FBC, Coagulation studies) in rural&#x2F;isolated places, the i-stat machine is used in australia. This is priced ok... around $40 per cartridge for around 6-10 results.<p>The i-stat works with not much more than a couple of drops of blood as well, although it needs to be drawn from a vein, not a finger-prick.<p>Other tests, like lipids, or antibody markers, etc, are rarer and much more expensive. It would be great to have them cheap (but again, we don&#x27;t really know how cheap theranos is saying tests are going to be)
which may make them more common, but again there just isn&#x27;t much benefit in taking them regularly.<p>Theranos may well be a white elephant. which is unfortunate. The promised technology (fingerprint testing) would be great. But I can&#x27;t comprehend how they could go for 12 years without a product. And as a doctor, I would be very suprised if the technology works as advertised.
There is unfortunately too much hype surrounding this product for me to believe that we will get what has been promoted, but you never know and I would love to be pleasantly surprised.<p>I wonder how popular this viewpoint will be here on HN - the home of lifehacking and microanalysis of bodyfunction (often without the corresponding knowledge to go with it, but prefaced with a view that &#x27;more data will always be better&#x27;).