Navigenics’ Medical Advice
As mentioned in The Unusually High Standards of Genomics, here is a screenshot of Navigenics’ “[medical advice] that is not [medical advice]” highlighted and captured directly from Navigenics’ own website. [pdf local copy of press release]
Navigenics Medical Advice
Frankly, I don’t have a problem with Navigenics so much as I do with the pathetic legal culture in America that tolerates the sale of “[blank] that is not [blank].” Why can’t Navigenics simply make no statement regarding its status as “medical advice” and Navigenics can be judged as it is —as medical advice? Since when was truth contingent on some disclaimer?
Oh right, since America became a marketing economy, and anybody can say anything as long as it’s “not willfully false.” But “not willfully false” is not “demonstrably true,” and while that might be good enough to sell cars, soda, and tampons, it’s not good enough for medicine. America has staked a precious few critical domains, like medicine, in which statements must be demonstrably true. Navigenics is trying to circumvent that standard by trying to claim its service should only be held to the same standard of truth we demand from everything else: none. And they’re succeeding! This is a press release. It was sent to every news agency. It has been live on the web for months. And who asked:
Mr. Doerr, according to this Navigenics press release which you have sent to my agency for my unconditional promotion review, your company states in this same document that it both provides and does not provide medical advice. Is the Navigenics product “Health Compass” medical advice, or is it not? If Navigenics Health Compass is not “medical advice,” what would you call a product called “Heath Compass” that processes a human biological sample and returns advice about how to be healthy? If that is not medical advice, then what need to change for it to be medical advice and why?
Instead, I read a bunch of limp-wristed bleating about unspecified calls for “more regulation.” What regulation? You mean more regulation like the kind that regulated finance? The kind where I can sell “[blank] that is not [blank]” and everybody sort of hopes that everything is OK because they have no idea what is going on but somebody once sort of alluded that there is an Authoritative Corpus of Abstruse Law that somebody probably knows about somewhere and everything is probably “being taken care of” and besides you have work in the morning and you have your own problems and that’s how democracy works anyways?
Do you mean that there should be “regulation” that specifies that words have meanings? Good luck.
I know, how about we cut the double-speak and demand as free-thinking, self-organizing, intelligent individuals that truth is truth. If you see something wrong, then say so specifically and clearly instead of vapidly announcing that somebody else should do so for you through “regulation.” Truth is not what some guy probably wrote in some document that one time but somebody will probably let us know if there’s a problem and anyways they probably couldn’t have done that if it was wrong because somebody would have sued them or something. The law is only as good as the people it governs.
Do not let Navigenics get away with selling the credit swaps of medicine!
Think Gene at Technorati
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Genomics Must Not Become The “Credit Swaps” of Health | Think Gene
[...] It happened in finance, it is happening in medicine, and now we have allowed the most promising new field of medicine, genomics, to be predicated by it. [...]