Direct-to-consumer medical testing: an industry built on fear

Mij

Mij

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
The direct-to-consumer medical testing industry is booming, with the global market predicted to reach more than US$9 billion by 2033. Genetic tests are increasingly available—with ten new ones entering the market every day—as well as biochemical tests for markers associated with health or disease, devices for monitoring parameters such as blood glucose, and even so-called wellness tests, all of which can be performed without a health professional involved. However, many screening tests sold to the public would not be conducted within a formal health system. Some have no medical purpose. Weak regulation has enabled the direct-to-consumer medical testing industry to flourish, but its growth is fueled by the exploitation of consumers’ fears and commercial interests that do not have our health at heart.

A recent Australian study found that, of several hundred direct-to-consumer tests evaluated, the vast majority had limited clinical utility, were non-evidence-based, or used methods or tested for conditions not recognized by the medical community. Companies advertise ‘‘fear nothing’’ and ‘‘free if we don’t find anything’’ tests. The likelihood is that most people will have at least one result that is outside the normal range when a panel of biomarkers are tested, and biomarker abnormality alone is not a disease.

Another emerging trend—the promotion of continuous glucose monitors to people without diabetes, with monthly subscriptions sold at great cost—lacks an evidence base and will create undue anxiety about diet. Medical testing should be grounded in evidence, not an opportunity to capitalise on the worried well.
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It's more the direct result of medicine not being able to treat certain problems, even refusing to acknowledge them or bullying patients with psychosomatic diagnoses. It's wildly out of place in this century. This kind of behaviour should have ended long ago.
 
I wonder whether this was a problem even in medieval times. It's booming now because there are more things that can be tested and more diseases with labels (some made up). As Hoopoe points out, failings in the health care industry contribute to the problem.

A quote I recently came across: "It's not a health care system, it's a sick care system." The system treats sickness rather than trying to achieve proper health. I certainly wouldn't call taking dozens of pills a day as healthy.
 
Creekside said:
I wonder whether this was a problem even in medieval times. It's booming now because there are more things that can be tested and more diseases with labels (some made up). As Hoopoe points out, failings in the health care industry contribute to the problem.

A quote I recently came across: "It's not a health care system, it's a sick care system." The system treats sickness rather than trying to achieve proper health. I certainly wouldn't call taking dozens of pills a day as healthy.
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I'm quite sure it did, in the form of people claiming to be witches or have special healing powers!

Source: Outlander
 
Trying to imagine computer security experts advising people not to use antivirus or antimalware software for similar reasons and I just can't. It's too ridiculous. Even though the same thing applies, some of it is not only useless but even malicious itself. Risk management is about reducing risk. You can't do that without information. And you rarely accomplish that without proper regulations, because exploiting and cheating others is natural human behavior, basically our default mode.

Obviously there is a lot, most of it in fact, of useless testing out there but that's the whole reason behind regulations. When regulations are hands-off you get the same outcome every-freaking-where. It's similar with supplements. Just freaking regulate them, none of this is hard. But they don't want to, they prefer instead to whine about it, even though overall it's worse outcomes that cost more.

Definitely that this is largely driven by medicine having convinced itself that fear of illness is worse than illness and being unable to make this into a coherent system beyond the 19th century mentality, with the model where MDs are in complete control and nothing medical happens outside of their immediate awareness. Psychosomatic ideology is ruining this profession but so are a mentality and culture stuck in time.
 
Creekside said:
A quote I recently came across: "It's not a health care system, it's a sick care system." The system treats sickness rather than trying to achieve proper health. I certainly wouldn't call taking dozens of pills a day as healthy.
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Some years ago, I think it was after I got ill with ME the first time and mostly recovered, me and my girlfriend contacted the local health service for that reason. We weren't ill, we wanted to get some advice in exactly that space where we could separate health care from sick care.

And they genuinely don't know how to do that. They were in fact very puzzled, that since we weren't drug users eating too much fast food and wasting ourselves on the couch, they just didn't really know where to go from there. There just isn't anything more than completely generic advice that fits on a single pamphlet page and only makes some bit of difference. Maybe 8 bullet points and it'd be a stretch not to be repetitive or be so generic as to be useless.

Because although 'healthy' behaviors can help produce better health outcomes, they only do so marginally. It's not even x fold, the difference is mostly trivial aside from maybe smoking, with the rest being largely socially determined (pollution and so on). There really is no such thing as health care yet. And instead of building it they built the giant quackery that is the biopsychosocial model, and haven't made a damn bit of progress since.

Maybe that's because there really isn't much to say, that most of those factors are beyond our control and largely political, but they don't dare go there for inexplicable reasons. Imagine if climate scientists decided to stay silent because it's too controversial. How ridiculous would that be. When a problem is political, you have no choice but to be political. But it seems that for health care professionals, they're basically held on a leash by their license to practice, or being ostracized by their peers. Don't rock the boat. Don't defy orders. Stay in line. Say the mandated bullshit. Keep quiet otherwise.
 
Propublica article about unregulated lab tests in the US.

High risk tests (such as prenatal genetic testing, rare diseases) that are unvalided will have to meet FDA requirements in 2027.

Unvalidated moderate and low risk lab tests in 2028.

https://www.propublica.org/article/fda-rule-lab-developed-tests-health-screenings

Of course, this doesn't touch upon the unregulated woo-quackery type of testing.
 
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