Stuff #1: I'm now on Twitter. Yay! Follow me, @PsychPractice1. You can just click the button to the right.
Stuff #2: Check out Ben Goldacre speaking at Mach 1 on the topic of nocebo. Really, you can hear the boom as he breaks the sound barrier. It's at the bottom of his most recent post, which discusses his article on the side effects of statins, and has a link to an interesting article that compares the results listed in Clinical Study Reports (CSR's) with their corresponding publications. Wanna guess the conclusion?
Stuff #3: I'm fascinated by a company I read about in Wired. It's called Theranos, and its product is lab tests. Cheap lab tests. From 1 drop of blood. With results in 4 hours. The founder, Elizabeth Holmes, dropped out of Stanford, and started the company with her tuition money. A few months ago, it opened its lab doors in a Walgreens on Palo Alto.
So let's take a look.
You have 1 drop of blood drawn from a finger stick. You can order up to 30 labs from this one sample. Here's a link to the menu of tests, which includes their costs. A CBC with Diff costs $5.35. Hemoglobin A1C is $6.67. And according to the Wired article, a panel of fertility tests, which normally costs $2000, is $35.
You can even add on a lab later, from the same sample. And they get results in, on average, 4 hours. This includes measuring the DNA of pathogens, rather than culturing, although I couldn't find the test for this on the menu-I don't know what it's called.
My question is, how does the accuracy compare to standard testing. Holmes claims that most error is due to humans, and all their testing is automated. But I'm skeptical.
If it turns out to be true, though, I'll be impressed (and I'll want to plunk some investment money into the company).