My biggest concern with Theranos, which I haven&#x27;t really seen acknowledged in any of these articles, is that multiparametric panels on asymptomatic individuals will lead to a proliferation of false positives. Running hundreds of tests whenever a patient decides to do so doesn&#x27;t make sense unless that ultimately enables better clinical outcomes for patients. And this is true regardless of whether the underlying measurement technology that Theranos has developed actually works or not.<p>It&#x27;s discussed in a journal article from earlier this year by a pathologist:<p>&gt; panel profiling, which was introduced in the 1970s as a way of identifying early biochemical changes of disease in asymptomatic individuals, had been abandoned in the 1980s, not so much for the cost. It has long been realized that with multiparametric testing, approximately 5% of results will be false positives, i.e., test results outside the reference intervals, in otherwise normal subjects. This is due to the definition of reference intervals, as being values between the 2.5 and 97.5 percentile of a reference (normal) population. The high cost of investigating seemingly abnormal results in normal people, and the added anxiety of patients, has led to the complete replacement of such biochemical profiling with what is now known as “discrete testing”. In the latter, tests are performed by the testing laboratory, only if requested specifically by the physician.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.degruyter.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;j&#x2F;cclm.2015.53.issue-7&#x2F;cclm-2015-0356&#x2F;cclm-2015-0356.xml" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.degruyter.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;j&#x2F;cclm.2015.53.issue-7&#x2F;cclm-20...</a>