Metrodora Clinic news and discussion (Salt Lake City area)

RedFox

RedFox

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Metrodora clinic, which the Instacart CEO announced founding a while back, is now open and taking patients. They specialize in a wide range of conditions, including ME/CFS, long Covid, POTS, connective tissue disorders, and IBS. Almost all of them share a common thread: They're poorly understood and have limited treatment options.

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Information on what insurance they accept is limited. Their new patient form merely states, "Metrodora is working hard to contract with multiple insurance payers at this time".
 
Bit of a side note (now I’ve checked) but I remembered reading about a place people with me/cfs apparently went to live because there was a treatment offered but they needed to be in town etc years ago so looked it up just in case it was this one but it isn’t (it’s one in Invline Village Nevada)

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/a-town-for-people-with-chronic-fatigue

anyway had to remind myself what the treatment then was: 2019 article and talks about Ampligen.

Be interesting to hear updates 4yrs on if places do offer different treatments and whether they do work out etc or if there are other things being tried in other countries I guess ?
 
I went to the patient questionnaire on their website to see what information they were gathering.

One of the questions is, "Are you a previously established patient of one of our clinicians?"

If yes, they ask you to select the doctor. I thought it would be interesting to share that list of names.
Doctor List.jpg
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I found an article talking about the Metrodora Clinic and its CEO:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90878703/instacart-ceo-fidji-simo-metrodora-institute

It's a much bigger operation than I thought! 15,000 patients expected by the end of the year?

And why are only women patients mentioned?
(line breaks added to both quotes)
On the eighth and ninth floors of a pristine building in a research park in Salt Lake City, employees in gray uniforms tread under gold light fixtures, past abstract artwork, and around plush couches in the waiting area where they check patients in.

This isn’t a high-end spa, though the gentle intake process was designed to mimic exactly that kind of environment.

It’s the Metrodora Institute, a $35 million clinic and research facility co-founded last year by Instacart CEO Fidji Simo.

Metrodora is dedicated to treating women with neuro-immune axis disorders: diseases including endometriosis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, long COVID, multiple sclerosis, lupus, and more, in which the immune system appears to attack the nervous system.

It opened to the public in March, and by the end of the year it expects to be treating 15,000 women, both at this outpatient facility, where there are currently thousands of people on the wait list, and remotely, via telehealth consultations.
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This quote reveals that the CEO has endometriosis and POTS.
Fast Company article said:
Simo, a marketer by training who spent more than a decade at Meta, eventually overseeing the flagship Facebook app, describes herself as “someone who always thinks of everything as a system.”

She was inspired to start Metrodora after dealing with endometriosis during pregnancy and then falling sick again with another chronic illness, postural tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, which is triggered when a patient’s heart rate increases rapidly upon standing, causing light-headedness.

It would take a couple of years for her to learn that though the symptoms for both illnesses are different, they can be related, and having one makes you at higher risk for having the other.

“I found that the level of care and the ability to find cures was, honestly, so poor,” Simo says. She wanted to create a clinic that would emulate cancer treatment centers like Houston’s MD Anderson, where silos between fields are removed, and treating a patient can involve many different specialists working together.

When dealing with issues of the nervous system, she says, “we need to understand the pathophysiology of the disease. We believe that every human is unique. Personalized medicine should be a thing.”
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I don't have the medical expertise to evaluate the claims made on the Metrodora website. It feels like there's a lot of hype, and I don't know whether the category "neuroimmune axis disorders" is valid.

I'm sorry to be so skeptical. I do hope that this ends up being a useful facility for patients.
 
ahimsa said:
If yes, they ask you to select the doctor. I thought it would be interesting to share that list of names.
Click to expand...

There are three main physicians listed, one of whom is Anne Maitland. She has co-published with Afrin on Mast Cell Activation Syndrome in EDS. I am pretty sure there is no such thing. I am afraid this looks like the standard alternative sideshow.
 
Re Doctors - I think the key thing is that since we don't a disease mechanism/biomarker/diagnostic test/treatments --- not much a Doctor can do constructively -- maybe negatively --- failing to support ---
I guess some Doctors would suggest we push for research like UK GWAS - Chris Ponting DecodeME - currently recruiting!
 
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