Healthcare or Health scare???
Sometime in the last couple of years a huge controversy erupted surrounding ‘Theranos’, a company that was set to revolutionize diagnostics. A single drop of blood on the Edison machine was touted as being able to perform hundreds of blood tests. Sounded like an amazing idea. However, as well as it was marketed, the execution failed miserably.
I honestly still think it is an amazing idea and great ideas do always fail at first. I am not playing the devils advocate here, but that is how I suppose science and technology advances. You make mistakes and learn and build from them. You do it again and again until you get it right. People on the internet went on to debate as to how the whole idea was preposterous and that anyone with half a brain would know it is a scam. I would beg to differ. I think the idea by itself is brilliant.
I am sure once upon a time, ABG machines didn’t exist. Today you can perform many such tests within a few minutes using just 2 ml of blood, from cardiac biomarkers to blood gases to electrolytes. I have noticed that they aren’t 100 percent accurate when compared with conventional lab reports but close. So, in an emergency situation that can be very valuable.
The issue was not that the founder, Elizabeth Holmes advertised the idea like she did. Many said, she was aping Steve Jobs, but unlike him was trying to pull a wool over the public and her investors too. I do not care personally as to how and if Holmes became a millionaire in the process. It is a crime obviously, but that’s up to the investors to take it up and fight and some of them are rightly doing so. Research always involves a lot of money and that is a risk the investors have to be willing to take in good faith.
The real issue was that the same invention was pushed to be tested in the public domain and they succeeded in doing so. The company came to be valued at 10 billion and the investors needed to re acquire the capital. They were supposedly assured that the technology works. The test reports however, were so erroneous that the tests had to be repeated with conventional measures. There were wrong cancer diagnoses that left the patients in a state of extreme turmoil until it was proven to the contrary and many such incidences which went on to taint the company’s image.
Not just that, there were reports of the employees being abused and threatened so much so that one of them committed suicide. They were asked to seal it up under the pretext of confidentiality while continuing to dupe the public. This carried on until someone blew the whistle on them. Elizabeth Holmes was then sentenced for 10 years.
Back home, sometime last year my mother complained of feeling under the weather. There wasn’t anything physically wrong with her, so we proceeded to get some blood tests done. The testing was arranged at one of the well known labs here. To my horror, the reports came back with grossly deranged values. I, for obvious reasons couldn’t sit tight with those reports and take no further action.
I had to rush my mother to the nearest hospital and get all the parameters re evaluated. The test reports there were well within normal limits. Those were a few super tensed hours. I did inform the lab about it, in fact I asked them to recheck even before we rechecked it at the hospital. There was zero accountability from their end. Not even an apology. Now, this lab later shut down only to re emerge with a different name. Not sure how that works out unless the people in question have decided to clean up their act.
When my patients ask me which lab to report from, I ask them to choose depending on whom they have faith in. I also tell them where I will go and where I will not. I did not sue the lab, but I know better than to trust them again. The rest is up to them. I know that laboratories and every health care organization that is privately run cannot run without their profit margin. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if they slightly increased the costs of their tests, but fudging up the reports and not taking any accountability for that is unacceptable.
Making money is great, but when you cheat and leech out of innocent men and women, it will cost you your reputation. And if it is a large scale public fraud, you need to pay for it irrespective of how well you have advertised yourself and your questionable product.
This has become some kind of scam nowadays, where start ups open up, get valuated beyond what they are actually worth, make an initial public offering and in the process the investors and the business owners make their money only for the business to crash in a few days time. It is always the public that pays for the debauchery of a few. I will get a lot of hate for saying this, but such start ups are no better than a Ponzi scheme.
You could have a fantastic idea and still fail, you could have a terrible one and fail. Failure is not the issue, but fraud is.
