141–150 of 408 posts
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Assumes facts not in evidence, I'm afraid.
Seriously, people who have been working on evidence based medicine for decades at this point have been struggling with the fact that what he describes as easy "slurp up a bunch of trials data, do the analysis" is actually pretty hard to get right, for a bunch of reasons.
His work is interesting as a free product, maybe as a side project could of grown over time into a potential acquisition. Slapping a paint of React (or Svelte) on top of his Excel-driven POC and a "show Hacker News" post might of been a better way to go.
However kudos to him for not only trying to pursue the idea but also for the write up. It's easy for me to armchair quarterback this one, especially since my father was a doctor who got hammered weekly by drug companies, but I'm sure his blood/sweat/tears will pay off in other ways.
I'm kind of concerned that people read this as satire but miss the most important part, namely the absence of concern about the safety and validity of the results. You know, the part where he stuck some statistical software in front of a database populated by a "motley crew" of contractors and wanted doctors to use it as a shortcut for making patient care decisions. The part where he implicitly compares the HTML spit…
[1] Given the reproducibility crisis, I'm not sure we should trust these much either, but that's a discussion for another time.
That was a fun read. I wish the author mentioned how much he was trying to sell the service for. It could have been $59 a month or $599 a month and with doctors you could potentially expect the same answer. I'm not a psychologist but some of the author's quoted text came off extremely demeaning in written form. If the author happens to read this, did you really say those things directly to them? For example, Susan (p…
He had not the slightest idea of how doctors prescribe drugs. The typical doctor has minimal training in evaluating medicines - that is not their job. They defer to so-called opinion-leaders, who are the experts on particular diseases. These people are the targets of drug companies' marketing - think scientific conferences in 5 star hotels in exotic locations. The cost of influencing them would be millions. So,the au…
> We worked at a startup that leveraged autonomous blockchains to transfer money from naïve investors to slightly less naïve twenty-somethings. There are worse gigs.
I remember reading this the last time and it was posted and I still think the core failure is that the author didn't actually recognize the issue he was solving. He thought the problem was choosing the most effective medicine when the real problem was decision fatigue looking at endless shelves of things that all seem to do the same thing. Those two problems sort of look the same, but the latter cannot be resolved by…
Sure but... would you really need any clinical data to make this valuable? A pharmacy could just make a decision tree with some common symptoms and do the same thing based on their own recommendations. Including data from studies is a neat enhancement but not necessary IMO.
I think perhaps there's greater value in the platform or methodology the author built for doing this type of meta analysis for medication. Could it be applied to other research fields I wonder. Could the software be licensed?
Perhaps this would have been a great business model to start astroturfing big pharma by focusing on SEO, allowing users to upvote meds that worked well for them and letting big pharma pay to bump theirs to the top or highlight it or something like that. Or for a given class of med, charge big pharma or individual chemists a certain amount for referral back links. As a consumer your flow is probably naturally: what ty…
> We have very high Page Quality rating standards for YMYL [Your Money or Your Life] pages because low quality YMYL pages could potentially negatively impact a person’s ... health
> The Lowest rating must be used for any of the following types of content on pages that could appear to be informational:
> * YMYL content that contradicts well-established expert consensus.
> There is no evidence that the author has medical expertise. Because this is a YMYL medical article, lacking expertise is a reason for a Low rating
Source[0] is 175 pages. Grep for "medical" or "YMYL" for more details.
[0]: Google Quality Rater Guidelines https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...
That was a fun read. I wish the author mentioned how much he was trying to sell the service for. It could have been $59 a month or $599 a month and with doctors you could potentially expect the same answer. I'm not a psychologist but some of the author's quoted text came off extremely demeaning in written form. If the author happens to read this, did you really say those things directly to them? For example, Susan (p…
As for the actual content, there’s a massive difference between customers dying to use your product and them telling you it’d be “neat”. People don’t buy “neat” products. This is why you talk money to them as soon as possible. No real surprise it didn’t work out for him, the incentives just aren’t there.
He could have prevented all this by reading the Mom Test - oh well, experience is the best teacher anyways.
This is the classic case of building a product that you hope will solve a problem instead of finding a problem first then building a product to solve it. The correct approach would have been to have those conversations with doctors before spending $40k to build the product. I've made this very mistake myself but I was lucky enough to have enough runway to start over and talk to customers first then pivot the product…
To be fair, when he started he didn't know he wanted to talk to doctors. That was after a pivot. Also, $40k is downright cheap compared to most failed projects to improve medicine. If it were someone else's money, that is.
Also I don't think $40K is cheap for an MVP. He could have used static HTML mock-ups, or even a few Power Point slides to see if his potential customers would have paid for that service.
About 8 years ago, we've built a SAAS for purchasing material for companies using auctions. The idea was that if it will be super easy for companies to do reverse auctions and use them to buy material they will save a lot of money (proven concept in those who actually used it).
But what we learned after some time was it didn't matter. Because people in the companies responsible for buying material didn't really care for how much they buy it. They care that they call their favourite supplier have a nice chat and then order whatever they need. And those suppliers throw some "gifts/rewards" to the package here and there. And without appraisal of those people the business owner never said yes.
The thing was that those people who effectively decided if they will use it or not didn't benefited from it at all.
We haven't lost so much money on that, but the lesson learned was huge.