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I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

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Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

#201

Post by marcinzm »

mirthflat83 wrote: post #200
marcinzm wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, there's a reason pharmaceutical companies in the US spend $20 billion a year marketing to physicians and it's not because it doesn't work. Doctors in the end are human and as capable of being influenced and biased and taking shortcuts as any other person. That doesn't mean they're evil, just human.

Please comment your estimate on how much those prescriptions make up compared to the total prescriptions that those doctors prescribe, because whatever you type, it will be very off.

I mean, you're just spewing insults at people instead of providing any numbers or facts. Clearly you don't want to have a discussion or educate anyone but just want to find reasons to insult people.

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

#202

Post by [deleted] »

marcinzm wrote: post #201
mirthflat83 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please comment your estimate on how much those prescriptions make up compared to the total prescriptions that those doctors prescribe, because whatever you type, it will be very off.

I mean, you're just spewing insults at people instead of providing any numbers or facts. Clearly you don't want to have a discussion or educate anyone but just want to find reasons to insult people.

[deleted]

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

#203

Post by pc86 »

intricatedetail wrote: post #168
sxg wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't even close to how doctors prescribe medications. You don't prescribe meds without having a working diagnosis. Once you have that, you use the knowledge gained in med school and residency to pick the first line drug. If there are contraindications due to comorbidities (which there often are), you have to figure out what other meds you can use. You can consult online resources (e.g. UpToDate) to look up seco…

This is what I saw my doctors were doing. Also I saw cardiologist comparing my diagnosis using Google images.

Having software to show differential diagnoses, or using Google images because you know to search for, are not the smoking guns you think they are.

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

#204

Post by pc86 »

james1071 wrote: post #126
ketzo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. I think tech people have a tendency to assume they know for certain that they have a better solution, and their words/tone can reflect that in a way that can come off as very insulting to people who have been working in the space for literal decades. Not everyone, and not all the time. But many people, and often enough that it's a stereotype. So I think it's worth considering, particularly when you're lookin…

He struck me as completely oblivious to what was likely to have been a complete lack of interest. His approach was never going to work, as doctors do not spend their time evaluating drugs in the way that he imagined.

It's a great example of "I'm going to make a pretty chart, and sell to.... $PROFESSION!"

It may have been a great product like you and others have said, he hasn't the faintest idea what physicians actually do day-to-day. He had apparently spent $40k over nearly a year before he talked to the first physician.

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

#206

Post by pc86 »

loceng wrote: post #105
dan-robertson wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conversations are surely paraphrased and exaggerated—just look at the style of the rest of the article. The position that doctors should be trying new things to improve their care sounds good but in practice most doctors are strongly biased towards the status quo and usually inaction is preferred to a slightly unknown action, even if that action has better expectancy.

Psychiatrists are simply experimenting on each person they prescribe medications to. The status quo is indoctrination, and in this case, the psychiatrist wasn't even willing to use actual research based data to improve the treatment of their patients - even referencing that they won't make anymore money because the patient won't come back more often or refer more patients because of it. This is abhorrent unprofession…

In medicine "quality care" is a binary attribute. Something either meets the quality threshold or it doesn't. And as the author found out, physicians do not spend their time researching medications. It's not their job, they're not trained in it, and most of them wouldn't be particularly good at it.

So I'm not sure why you would expect a psychiatrist to do something she's not trained to do to (maybe) increase an already acceptable metric some arbitrarily small amount higher.

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

#209

Post by [deleted] »

gault8121 wrote: post #15

This article's thesis seems to be that medical professionals are not incentized to provide the best interventions, and as a result, wouldn't pay for this service. However, what the author fails to mention is the competitors in this space that are successful, such as Up To Date, which provides really high-quality research trial data: https://www.uptodate.com/home Rather than building a product that informs medical pro…

[deleted]

Re: I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

#210

Post by johnisgood »

nickjj wrote: post #9

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…

Note: psychologists cannot prescribe anything here (Eastern Europe), psychiatrists can.

I do not see any issues telling doctors that they are prescribing the wrong medication because you may know it better than them. I personally learnt a lot about pharmacology due to my illness, and I know what kind of medications are should not be supposed to be prescribed which the doctor working at the ER at that moment may not. In any case, you could just point out the reasons, I believe.

For example: highly lipophilic beta-blockers are an issue in my case as I get anxious over its CNS side-effects that others may take it for performance anxiety, see: propranolol. The doctor prescribing me propranolol would be in the wrong. My own psychiatrist had no clue that lipophilic beta-blockers can cause all sorts of issues (CNS side-effects, such as brain fog) that lead to anxiety and even panic attacks for me. In my case, something like atenolol or even nebivolol would have worked better. Some doctors know this, some do not. I do not reasonably expect them to know everything though. It is sort of a detail that is not known because it is commonly prescribed to the elderly who do not report those CNS side-effects because they attribute them to their old age.

There were cases of metoprolol causing hallucinations[1]. The old person attributed it to having some kind of a super power of seeing the dead because their heart stopped for a few seconds and they were "dead". I am not sure if this is the article I posted, but there was such a case.

People who research their own specific illness may know better than some doctors, really.

Sorry if I was a tad off-topic.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3295654/

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