[DanBC]

It's useful to try to understand what's going on with the blood testing stuff, because it shows how hard it is for people in public health to get accurate messages across.

Some people think more information is always good. We see healthy people without any symptoms will sometimes pay for "whole body MRI scans".

Some people think that if you have an illness it's going to be seen in the blood.

Frequent traditional blood tests are time consuming and not that pleasant.

Theranos claims that they don't need that much blood; that they can do a blood test with just a drop.

This means people don't need to see a phlebotomist nurse to have blood taken, they can just blot a drop of blood on a stick.

So, the claim goes that people can have very many blood tests all the time, and that will give us more data, and that data is always good.

Theranos plays into some deeply entrenched stuff, so while it's alarming they got so much money it shouldn't really be that surprising.