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by dimdimdim
3649 days ago
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Not when your bug can kill a person or damage his organs due to wrong medication give because of a wrong test result. http://www.wsj.com/article_email/theranos-voids-two-years-of... There is a reason Healthcare is regulated and required multiple degrees of testing before it can be released to the general public -- imagine every new "health startup" pushing new drugs and then saying they'll "fix a bug" when a couple of folks die. The comparison is immature. |
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Quite the opposite. Health regulations suffer from a number of perverse incentives that economists have studied extensively:
Drugs are needlessly delayed in getting to market. Doctors and patients are perfectly capable of assessing the risk/reward of an unproven treatment by looking at scientific studies. The FDA adds a layer of false-security... in spite of its sluggish process, the FDA is often quite wrong and drugs that were approved get taken off the market. For other drugs, they are delayed for several years and much harm is caused. Economists have studied this and found that regulators cause much needless suffering and death by being excessively risk-averse.
Consider too illegal drugs. Our regulators criminalize many substances, resulting in black market behavior and significant crime and other negative effects. Here too, backward regulations cause much unnecessary suffering, death (and crime too).
For people who do not understand healthcare, the world appears quite black and white. In reality no treatment works all of the time, and no test is without its share of inaccurate results. Doctors are equipped with enough Bayesian reasoning ability to use the available information wisely.
Also, a physician should not base any decisions on a single blood test result. That is not the proper way to use such tests. If it were, doctors and medical training would not be necessary. Most tests have a significant probability of false positive and false negative results, so docs are trained to consider the results only in the context of other diagnostic clues.