Theranos, The Wall Street Journal, and what Everyone is Missing: the Harms of Overtesting

Theranos is a Silicon Valley start-up dedicated to revolutionizing (some would say disrupting) the medical blood testing industry.  The claim to fame of the company was to use a single drop of blood from a finger stick to run hundreds of tests.  This premise led to a $9 Billion valuation and rock-star status for it's founder, Elizabeth Holmes- and was recently threatened by a Wall Street Journal exposé, which claimed the company's tests were not that accurate and that they used traditional blood testing for most of their work.

Eko the Electronic Stethoscope: A Failure to Comprehend the Rituals of Medicine

A glowing article on electronic stethoscopes recently appeared in the Chicago Tribune.  The Eko Core is a device which, "brings the power of modern technology to an already essential device. The implications could be huge for patient care."

I am no Luddite- I chose to attend USC for medical school because of it's Health, Technology and Engineering Program- to further my interests in engineering and building new devices while going through a full, rigorous medical education.  But it pains me to say that I suspect this is yet another overhyped device that does not fulfill a true healthcare need.  It has fallen prey to a common problem- a lack of deep understanding of medical science and practice by an engineering team seeking to provide an elegant solution to a perceived technical problem.