My new medical research startup launches today: let me know what you think

It was a joke that outlived its meaning, but still, here we are. :)

This is the sort of service that a general practitioner should be providing.

The vast majority of patients have routine problems. Though these might be distressing to the individuals, the "standard of care" (assuming correct diagnosis) is established practice, and this service would not affect that.

For the few with very rare conditions, or with useless primary care physicians, this service might be useful, however the price is very high for what is essentially a diagnostic/referral service.

Nevertheless, I think it could be commercially successful, given the number of people who think they know more about medicine and medical practice than their doctors do.

Congrats on an audacious project!

Unfortunately, main site not working for me.

So, "at least two of our expert researchers will validate test results to rule out any errors"?

What does that mean, exactly? As a board certified pathologist, I have some idea what I mean by validation, but what do you mean?

Next, the featured testimonial from "Jerry W." sounds fishy - it may be genuine, but it seems like it was written by marketing, and lacks any detail to provide credibility to skeptical evaluators.

Next, when research is published, there is a p value, perhaps 0.04. When you provide your recommendations to patients, I'm sure you are smart enough to hedge appropriately. How do you communicate that? Do you guarantee follow-up if new research modifies the confidence of your previous recommendations?

Finally, research evaluating one treatment versus another typically are provided in the context of routine patient care for the average patient. Your clientele here, clearly, are not run of the mill patients. With the proposed fee structure, they are also not likely pursuing routine treatment. This suggests that routinely published research will be less applicable to your customers. This amounts to being a huge selection bias. How do you plan to adjust for this issue? (As a specific example for one class of these problems, for those not familiar with these kinds of issues: the reason we don't perform routine mammograms in women starting at age 20 is not just cost - the prevalence is so low in this age range that the false positive rate is very high. So, patients who obtain a mammogram at age 20 for "screening" are at higher risk of false positives.)

Interesting idea, but I'm wondering about the iterative nature of some diagnosis and treatment. I'm specifically thinking about how my wife went through lots of trial and error with eliminating particular things from her diet to get a handle on what was making her feel so terrible.

The way I'm reading the site, it feels more like a one-shot "we'll run a bunch of tests and give you a single comprehensive analysis" which seems like a good idea in theory, but scares me in practice.

With every research report, we include a summary of what we can do further research on if something changes, we get new information, or the budget is expanded. You're right that we don't make this very prominent on the site, though - thanks for the feedback.