Having worked in health tech for the past ten years, I can name other companies that are equally massive frauds that just haven't been discovered yet. All you need is a good PR team and some big name investors, and it doesn't matter if what you're creating is real or not... you can get away with a lot.
Health care and medicine isn't a "fake it till you make it" type of industry, but that's the entire model that's preached in the startup world. So, almost by definition, startups + health care is really ripe for fraud and deception.
I've found the same thing to be true. The successful medtech startups are consistently from experienced folks that have spent years in that industry who identify an unmet need and go after it. Every single medtech startup that has been led by a startup bro right out of school with personal connections to money has been successful in raising money, building hype and a PR machine, but not in creating meaningful value to the patient and caregiver, and not making it to the clinic.
There seem to be industries that cannot be disrupted by dumping hundreds of millions of VC dollars on PR and marketing and undercutting the competition until you're the last man standing. Health care and pharma for one, I'd say aerospace as well (exceptions like SpaceX notwithstanding, and they have a top notch team and Shotwell who seem to be perfectly able to manage both an aerospace company and its tech bro founder).
The formula of "dumping hundreds of millions of VC dollars on PR and marketing and undercutting the competition until you're the last man standing" work on industries that had no "difficult problems" to solve in the first place, and only need marketing and scale.
It's not a coincidence that the companies that succeeded with the formula were internet ads, and monopolies that provided day to day services (replacing mundane stuff like taxis, hotels, social interaction, etc...)
Cerebral (cerebral.com): first, their whole business model is about being a pill farm for controlled substances. So, out of the gate that's pretty concerning (but, yes, you can make a lot of money by providing easy access to adderall and ativan). Beyond that, they're having a hell of time recruiting providers and so their lead time for appointments is pretty high. They're still taking customers on a subscription basis, but can't provide appointments. I think it's just a matter of time before that whole mess collapses.
One Medical (onemedical.com): in early 2021, they were caught letting people skip the line for covid vaccines. The house select committee on coronavirus investigated them and released a pretty damning report back in December, and their SEC filings have indicated that they're under further investigations by some various organizations. Based on this information and other chatter I've heard, I don't think that's the only questionable thing they've done.
> first, their whole business model is about being a pill farm for controlled substances
Before COVID, you couldn’t get a prescription for controlled substances without first meeting a provider in person.
This law was enacted years ago because pill mills were popping up everywhere and dispensing controlled substances to people in exchange for $200+ phone calls. They’d do a minimal 5 minute call with anyone who signed up, speedrun through a prepared script, and then send the patient their controlled substance prescription of choice. You then made a follow-up appointment the next month for your refill, which was an even shorter phone call.
They didn’t accept insurance because no sane insurance company would deal with them. Their target audience only wanted to pay their way to prescriptions and didn’t mind.
And this is exactly what Cerebral is doing all over again. The COVID exceptions for in-person prescribing will theoretically expire at some point, but until they do there are several companies like Cerebral trying to cash in as much as possible with Instagram and TikTok ad campaigns to convince as many people as possible to sign up for literal Adderall pay-for-prescription subscriptions.
Before anyone rushes off to sign up, keep in mind that these controlled substance prescriptions will be logged in your state’s prescribing database and doctors everywhere are catching on to these pill mills. If you show up to a real doctor later asking for a prescription, they might check your prescribing history and think twice after seeing that you were getting prescriptions from known pill mills nowhere near you.
Pharmacies are also getting fed up with the sudden influx of prescriptions from remote doctors for scheduled substances.
I really hope this business model gets crushed ASAP, because if it’s allowed to continue then we’re going to see a crackdown on ADHD diagnoses and prescribing in the same way that pain management has become exceedingly difficult to come by (for true pain patients) in the wake of the opioid pill mill epidemic.
The most commonly prescribed medication for ADHD is pharmacologically essentially the same as meth. It affects us ADHD people differently than the rest of the population.
> The most commonly prescribed medication for ADHD is pharmacologically essentially the same as meth.
I'm not sure about that. If I remember correctly, the most prescribed medication for ADHD is Adderall, and Adderall is amphetamine salts. Amphetamine and methamphetamine are not the same, though they are close. Also, the difference between a therapeutic dose of amphetamine or methamphetamine and what the regular drug abuser uses is huge.
I'm not at my home computer so I'm not able to pull up citations, but there is a paper I have read in which they gave meth addicts amphetamine-based ADHD medication vs typical equivalent street doses of meth in a double-blind study, and the meth addicts reported them as basically equivalent. I say "basically equivalent" because they were not indistinguishable due to different formulations having noticeably different durations of effect, but the high they produced and the side effects were basically the same. This study was a pretty big deal because it demolished the widespread assumption that the methyl- group makes methamphetamine more neurologically potent.
So yeah, aphetamine (Adderall et al) and meth are basically the same, pharmacologically. The anticipated differences between them in their effect on the body and mind largely aren't real.
Most studies I've seen of methamphetamine for ADHD treatment use 20-40mg doses, sometimes but not necessarily split in two. A google search seems to claim that abusers take up to 50mg at a time. That's not a lot higher than the prescribed dose.
I'm a physician who's prescribed medications for many ADHD adults. Methamphetamine (MA) is legal to prescribe for ADHD and indeed a few patients had best results with it. MA isn't "stronger" than D-amphetamine but may be better tolerated. AIUI the main reason MA is the dominant street amphetamine-type drug is that it's easier to synthesize in clandestine labs vs. classic amphetamine. At equivalent doses the effects are similar.
In any case you're right that there's a big difference in street drug use vs. therapeutic doses. For street drug user a typical daily dose is on the order of 1000mg whereas prescribed doses are with few exceptions 1-2 orders of magnitude below that. MA in particular is in the lower end of the range, I'd say 10-20mg/day (partly due to it being a very expensive pharmaceutical product if in fact it's even being manufactured at present).
Only a small portion of methamphetamine users are using a full gram in a single dose. Perhaps spread over a day or two, but most recreational doses are closer to 100mg
I've seen the same thing as you for methamphetamine and amphetamine being "basically equivalent" but it was a study in rats. However, patients usually rate desoxyn (which is methamphetamine) higher (~10% higher) than either adderall or dexedrine (another amphetamine), and methamphetamine is supposed to be better at crossing the blood brain barrier. I'm not sure if I would call it equivalent/the same but they're very close. Especially this part:
> The anticipated differences between them in their effect on the body and mind largely aren't real.
You're totally right about that. People associate methamphetamine with drug abuse and amphetamine with people taking adderall, but I think it's a case where the dose makes the poison.
For the abusers parts, I've found Simon et al, 2001 "A comparaison of patterns of methamphetamine and cocaine use", that would indicate doses of 500 mg, usually snorted instead of "eaten". As an anecdote, a friend that used to abuse amphetamine consumed around 300 mg a day.
...and even for us, there are side effects. Concerta made me irritable and I wouldn't eat anything. I know someone who was on Focalin for a while and they suffered from awful mood swings and depression. I've been on the same dose of Vyvanse for 10 years and I still get occasional mood swings.
I'm not on anything, and I get occasional mood swings too. ;)
My point: For many of these substances, I'm perfectly capable of managing my own dosing, side-effects, and knowledge resources without a government-mandated overseer. Maybe the solution is to deregulate & facilitate access to knowledge providers, but not enforce more regulation.
I think we should get rid of the Controlled Substances Act and the DEA. Everything should be available over the counter from a pharmacist on request. (I'd still involve the pharmacist because they're a professional at identifying drug interactions and such, but you shouldn't require a scrip to get access to medication.)
But in your original comment you asked if there is any evidence that there is adverse effects from excess prescriptions. And, well, there's plenty of adverse effects from meth use (source: every trailer park in small town America). And studies have shown that the amphetamines commonly prescribed for ADHD produce an indistinguishable high amongst recreational users.
So if you made these drugs unscheduled and available over the counter, you'd basically just replace drug cartels and your local dealer with the Pharma industry and your local CVS. Which don't get me wrong, is a massive fucking improvement! I'm all for that. But you'd certainly also have a heck of a lot of meth-heads wrecking their lives with over-the-counter meds.
Any such legalization and normalization would require active community support and intervention to help substance abusers too.
My only resistance to that idea is this: Passing that law would invariably result in some deaths.
Sure, it would primarily be the people who had no control over themselves in the face of their addictions, but making all drugs legal would cause many, many people to either overdose or to keep taking the drugs until they died from secondary effects.
If that could be mediated, I am all for full legalization of all drugs, including "hard" drugs like cocaine and heroin.
Other countries have done similar things and found a decrease in usage among both new and previous users, a decrease in overall drug-related deaths, a decrease in drug-related crime, and an increase in rehabilitation.
I may not approve of using drugs myself, but I think what I do with myself is my business and what others do with themselves is their business. I would prefer for things to be as good as they can be with the goal of getting better, and broad scale legalization has strong potential to be a step in the right direction.
Not passing that law has already resulted in needless deaths (lookup the history of HIV antivirals and the FDA to see what I mean). Don't forget to account for the opportunity cost of inaction.
I can't quite classify it but I feel that there is an ethical line between the deaths that are occurring because of a person's flaunting of a law and the deaths that would occur because of a law being changed.
As a terrible analogy, if we made it against the law to wear seat belts, some people would die who would not otherwise die.
Most people would continue to wear seat belts anyway as they are aware that wearing a seat belt is far safer than not wearing a seat belt.
Further, it makes sense that a large portion of those people who would die would be the ones that weren't wearing seat belts to begin with regardless of the law, but it stands to reason that some percentage of people who die would be people who would have worn seat belts but chose not to because it was no longer illegal to drive without a seat belt.
I feel there would be a similar outcome to mass drug legalization. Most people would have no change in their lives. Some people who were subconsciously mid-drug induced suicide would continue on and die quicker thanks to the ease of access and legalization, but there would be some people who, without the legal issues and difficulty of obtaining the drugs being an inhibitor would then choose to indulge, and some fraction of those people may overdose or otherwise harm themselves where they would have been protected by the current status quo.
It's hard to navigate mentally but I feel confident in the statement even if it is not fully formed.
I'm also on Vyvanse. Side effects are thankfully minimal compared to some of the horror stories I've heard. But I do have trouble sleeping, routinely rub my tongue raw from bruxism, and if I accidentally have any caffeine I feel like my heart is going to explode. But it is way better than being off medication.
The "TikTok-ification" of medicine is pretty frightening as well.
> One ADHD content creator, Reece Palamar, has posted about a half-dozen Cerebral-related videos to his almost 600,000 TikTok followers. (https://www.tiktok.com/@reeceisrandom?lang=en)
Do either of these creators look like they're qualified to provide medical advice? They're getting millions of views to dance around and convince people that they have ADHD and need amphetamines. Why? Because they have trouble keeping their lives organized in an age of smartphones and constant media bombardment. But doesn't everyone?
> Some ads suggest that symptoms as common as difficulty with multitasking, focusing, and stress, as well as poor planning, procrastination, and disorganization can all be symptoms of ADHD. (They can also, as one former Cerebral nurse says, “simply be attributed to being an adult in 2022.”)
While this article is particular to Cerebral, they are not the only offenders. There is a whole cottage industry around convincing people with mild organizational problems that they have ADHD, even in "traditional" psychiatry. It's happened to family members and friends of mine.
I was diagnosed with ADHD and went through an Adderall -> Vyvanse -> Ritalin pipeline. I eventually settled on using half of the smallest available dose of Ritalin (5mg/2 = 2.5mg) and that is plenty for me. It's scary how many people I know who are dependent on regular doses of 30+mg of amphetamines.
> It's scary how many people I know who are dependent on regular doses of 30+mg of amphetamines.
I’m actually very worried about where this is heading. We had a cohort of mentees come through a mentorship program I help with who ended up recommending Cerebral to each other and getting prescriptions together. I didn’t catch on until later when they started talking about regrets, but I was stunned at how easily they were prescribed excessive doses in exchange for cash payments.
Once the initial euphoria of a medically unnecessary or otherwise excessive amphetamine prescription wears off (and it will), some people end up in a rather unhealthy place. There is no free lunch.
Asking for a friend, but is the secret to receiving Softbank capital just to be either a scam or a highly misleading business? I still can't work out why they ever invested so much in WeWork.
In short, the background of Softbank founders is in plumbing of the financial system. They intentionally bid up dubious companies into obviously unsustainable valuations, with the aim to make them highly illiquid. Faced with illiquid stocks, many of the assumptions behind trading models break down, and obscurities of the financial plumbing come to fore - the water Softbank knows really well. Eventually, index funds include a portion of the bid-up companies on their balance sheets, FOMO investors roll in - that's when Softbank unloads their bags
I use onemedical because it's easy to find providers in my area with them but I recently got notified of a class action lawsuit against them for... misleading people into thinking they need a membership to use their facilities? I'm still confused on whether this means I actually need this membership in order to book appointments etc.
You can still book and have appointments without a membership, but you have to call the office instead of being able to use the app. It's totally undocumented but I'm guessing it's some legal continuing-care thing as to why they have to offer it
Not to sound silly - but how is it strange? They offered her 6+ figures to use her name and then they used her name… seems relatively straightforward. Mayim Bialik is hocking “brain pills”; Matt Damon, Snoop, and every other celebrity is hocking crypto currencies. Most celebrities will put their names on almost anything if the price is right.
I mean, can anyone without looking it up, say exactly what the typical job responsibilities for the Chief Impact Officer in a typical company is?
I would guess that her "job" is to have a recognizable name and face that they can put on her advertising, and probably to not go around committing crimes or doing things that would make her name less valuable to the public at large in the process.
Serious question: what the hell is a chief impact officer? Isn't former prince Harry also one for some startup? Is it basically just an celebrity spokesperson?
I feel like people stopped giving credibility to celebrity endorsement in the traditional form because they know celebrities are just getting paid to read a script, so companies had to come up with something that signals a deeper relationship with the brand, and that something is this phony C-level position. The celebrities also benefit from being able to add "entrepreneur" to their Instagram bios. I believe this trend started with Intel and it's "Chief Innovation Officer" (or something like that) Will.i.am a couple of years ago
When I see stuff like that, I instantly take the company less seriously or ignore them unless the person in charge is someone eccentric like Elon. At least he is capable of running his company in a ruthlessly effective way even with wonky titles and shenanigans.
When I see someone endorse Elon Musk, I instantly take them less serious and avoid getting into into discussions with them, unless they own a Model X. At least it means they're capable of purchasing low-quality luxury goods....?
He didn’t abdicate (nor can he). He just became a “non active” family member. The title is conferred by birth not by job - so he is very much still Prince Harry!
A way to give a C-suite job to someone who was "homeschooled", has a degree from an online school she is a "brand ambassador" for, and zero professional experience.
Worked at one softbank backed company for a short time and the amount of money and heads they dumped at any problem was incredible. Literally they tried to grow and scale at all costs.
That doesn't work for mental health though. Money can't buy more therapists to meet patient demand.
Edit: more importantly I would never trust my mental health with a company that takes money from Khashoggi's murderers.
I worked at one SB company and yeah, they had basically unlimited money to throw at problem, but their main competitors had too, from what I heard.
The funding world is _weird_ and I really wonder when the music will stop. I thought (hoped? against my short-time self-interest) that COVID will be such a crisis that will make people reconsider all these crazy spendings, but, apparently not!
> I would never trust my mental health with a company that takes money from Khashoggi's murderers.
It's interesting that Khashoggi's assassination is what seems to bother people most about the Saudis. Not the invasion of Yemen that has killed over a hundred thousand civilians or the littany of other crimes.
Because Khashoggi's murder is so well covered and so just blatantly bold. The war in Yemen doesn't bother people that much because a) who knows where Yemen actually is b) Yemen is a poor and mostly muslim country c) Saudi is buying western weapons and selling us oil d) Saudi is hosting the Formula 1.
Considering what Saudi Arabia is doing in Yemen, with implicit support from NATO countries, and what Russia is doing in Ukraine we (as in Europe and the "West") should have stopped all business relationships with Saudi quite a while ago.
Saudi's actions bother me so, up to the point I refuse to work as much as possible with them, for them or with money from them. Luckily, for now at least, that is made easy since (to my knowledge) my employer isn't funded by Saudi blood money. It is funded by Chinese money so, which poses an interesting dilemma.
It's the mental image of a sedative plunge, plea to breathe by an asthmatic, and rapid dismemberment in a plastic wrapped room by a hit squad of private jet flown high level Saudis. He was going to get marriage paperwork completed. The callus calculation left an impression.
It doesn't diminish the deaths of 100k civilians. No whataboutism debate necessary, both are barbaric. One was top of mind, neither is mutually exclusive.
The common denominator between Saudis and Russia is oil and lack of conscience or moral compass. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
As someone with a long-standing Vyvanse prescription, I find the concept of ADHD pill mills horrifying.
These drugs develop dependencies in long-term users (I would know). They can have pretty nasty side effects, and even the more benign options can still cause mood swings and appetite issues (again, I would know). For most people, it can take years before tolerances stabilize (I got lucky). They probably have long-term effects on your brain that we don't know about yet, but meth gives us a good guess.
My employer gives us OneMedical. I can’t say I really understand what it is. I concluded its a concierge service for some tests and procedures. Given the location of their offices, not surprised about the trouble they got themselves into. They seem like another in the pile of companies who provide enterprise scale HR services, billed at scale. Calm, too (the idea of celebrity voices leading meditations seems orthogonal to my mind).
In fairness to One Medical, there's fraud like Theranos where the core conceit of what they're selling isn't actually _real_, and there's shady activities that are going to get them what I would hope is a pretty serious fine and some consequences (but who knows, America) like engineering some line cutting for vaccines, or the class action wherein they very significantly downplay that anyone can book an appointment manually without paying the fee.
At its core, One Medical is still offering actual healthcare services. I use them and appreciate the convenience of the app and integrated EMR that they offer. I'm not pleased about the shadiness here, obviously, but it's still so wildly better an experience of primary care that I'm not going to switch over it.
That's true - One Medical is definitely responding to a real need (lack of easy access to primary care). I don't think they'll outright collapse like the other examples, but I would think/hope there's a major shake up in their leadership.
They've done a good job at creating a real loyal base of customers, but they've also painted themselves into a corner with their business model. On one hand, they sell memberships en masse to self-insured employers claiming they lower total cost of care so can save them money. On the other hand, they're building partnerships with large healthcare systems, where the partners view One Medical as a source of insured patients that will eventually need specialty services. But large healthcare systems are notorious for being expensive. So, their two main business models are in conflict with each other. I think some of the things we're seeing are a reflection of this lack of a coherent strategy, and some of the flailing that comes with different arms of the business having opposing needs.
It's interesting you mention their integrated EMR. One Medical builds their own medical record system and patient app. My understanding is it doesn't use any of the standards the rest of the health tech world uses, which is why (last I heard) they weren't offering HealthKit integration -- not that there's not a demand for it (with such a tech focused user based, I imagine it's a common request), but rather they couldn't deliver on it quickly because their infrastructure just isn't set up that way.
FYI: Controlled substance prescriptions will be registered in your state’s controlled substance database. Any future provider will be able to see that you’ve gotten pills from a pill mill doctor if they care to look, at least until the records fall off.
This is basically the opioid epidemic being repeated with amphetamine.
If you believe you actually have ADHD, get a real appointment with a real doctor and build a real relationship that doesn’t involve a cash-only subscription to a pill mill. Using a pill mill will jeopardize your future doctor relationships and the pill mills will be shut down as soon as the COVID controlled prescribing exceptions expire.
Ugh stop trying to demonize this. I have a diagnosed problem which I used to take a controlled substance for from a psych who I had dedicated sessions with. Every time I went to the pharmacist, I had to put my name on a binder for the "controlled substances list" and got dark looks from the pharmacist every time I filled my prescription in. It was embarrassing enough at first admitting to friends and family that I sough mental health help. Attitudes like yours intimidate so many people who rely on controlled substances for living fulfilling everyday lives. With the help of my psych I left the controlled substance, but a significant factor was the stigma I'd face from friends, family, and the judgemental pharmacists who knew nothing about me.
Pill mill or not, let people find a way to live their best lives. Unless you're a doctor or healthcare professional, stop telling others how to live their lives.
If you let people find their own free way to best live their lives, they won't.
Exposing the masses to strong, addictive and unhealthy drugs means getting more people hooked. What follows is crime, unemployment, heavier drugs, death.
Unless you understand that your use-case might not fit the public, stop implying substances are controlled for no reason.
In a country like the US where big pharma keeps lobbying to regulate as little as possible I would pause and think about why they're not OTC and how it would affect the general population if they were.
> If you let people find their own free way to best live their lives, they won't. Exposing the masses to strong, addictive and unhealthy drugs means getting more people hooked. What follows is crime, unemployment, heavier drugs, death.
Ah like the War on Drugs, got it.
> Unless you understand that your use-case might not fit the public, stop implying substances are controlled for no reason.
You're constructing a strawman. You're taking what I said ("whether it's a pill mill or not, let folks live their lives") and interpreting it in the weakest way possible ("implying substances are controlled for no reason".) This is not what I said. A "pill mill" (some pejorative used for institutions that folks disagree with apparently) is an institution that has some medical liability. It's not making every substances an unregulated one.
Other than leading to the same thing they have nothing in common, and the reason there is a war on drugs is a complex, heated political topic.
At no point did I say the war on drugs is a good thing.
You're constructing a strawman, You're taking what I said (leads to people's misery) and interpreting it in the weakest way possible (drugs are bad). This is not what I said, I said that exposing the masses to addictive drugs is a really bad idea.
You tried giving opioids to everyone, everyone got hooked on opioids, rinse and repeat.
I'm not saying we should mistreat or lock up consumers of drugs, I'm saying it's a good idea to limit exposure in the first place. Drugs help people everywhere, they also ruin people everywhere.
>This is basically the opioid epidemic being repeated with amphetamine.
No it isn't, it's a repeat of the previous American amphetamine epidemic, which has somehow been successfully memory-holed despite lasting multiple decades.
If appointments with local mental health experts weren't booked out months in advance, I wouldn't be here. I don't "believe" I have ADHD, I know it and have a diagnosis to that effect; but I have to speak to a psych in person (in the 'normal' system) for bullshit bureaucratic reasons to get meds restarted.
I'm elated this exists, and find your demonizing of it to be insensitive, hyperbolic and distasteful. Please mind your own business.
I'm happy for you. Hopefully they continue to offer you quick access to services. However, I'd encourage you to look on twitter and in the news for examples where Cerebral went radio silent on patients who were waiting for refills. Maybe consider savoring the prescriptions you get, since you don't know when/if the next one will arrive ;)
The promise is more "we will deep freeze your brain, and in the future we will maybe come up with a technology that allows us to resurrect you in whatever form". Which is what companies like Alcor have been promising for decades already. So for people who sign up it's more like betting a sizeable amount of money on a small chance that they will be resurrected someday, which is still better (in their opinion at least) than dying like everyone else does...
"Having worked in health tech for the past ten years, I can name other companies that are equally massive frauds that just haven't been discovered yet."
You say you can name other companies that have not yet been "discovered" yet, and yet you name zero companies. Are you just teasing. Please name them and let's have a look.
I did name companies-- Cerebral and One Medical-- I just named them in a later comment. A few bonuses: BetterHelp and Noom, both rely on dubious studies of their efficacy to promote their products. 100Plus (prior to acquisition, I know less about it with its current leadership) was playing a game that was really close to insurance fraud.
They're not Theranos-level situations... that was just insane in how brazen its fraud was. But more the uBiome-type, where it's illegal or deceptive and at risk of being shut down as a result. And, not to mention, their behavior might be actually harming patients.
I just need to avoid the ones that I have NDAs with from lawsuit settlements over their illegal activities ;) The companies I've listed are welcome to sue me. I'm in California, and I'm talking about matters of public interest in a public forum. California has one of the stronger SLAPPBack statutes, so sue away!
Their tech wasn’t fraud as far as I know. There are a dozen other companies using the same technology. 16S rRNA gene sequencing. I used them and never felt deceived with the data I got.
Yeah this is an important distinction here: Theranos's technology never reached the level of accuracy it needed in order to do the thing it set out to do: report accurate blood tests. uBiome's core technology _did_ work: it revealed counts of various flora in your gut.
What they did that was problematic was they basically offered the service with a nod and wink guarantee that they wouldn't bill you for the service, but would rather have a doc in their employ rubber stamp a "prescription" for the test, to then bill your insurance. They would bill insurance some fairly astronomical amount, too, like, IIRC, $3k-$4k. They'd warn you the entire time "if the insurance company sends you an EOB telling you there's a balance you may owe from us, don't worry, we won't charge you!"
Multiple layers of problematic, both with regards to how they threaded the needle to get a script written for the test to be defensibly "covered" by insurers, and the rates they were charging.
But at least the tech seemed validated and fairly accurate.
Fraud comes in multiple flavors, there is product fraud, there is business fraud and there is accounting fraud. uBiome may not be Theranos-style product fraud, if their business practices are fraudulent it is still fraud. Saying otherwise would be saying Enron wasn't fraud because the tech worked...
Most of what made Theranos a scam wasn't that their tech was impossible. It was that they were committing mass fraud by making a lot of claims about what they were doing that were false.
It seems like if your underlying technology actually works but you run the rest of your business with the same scams as Theranos, you qualify as Theranos-lite
Theranos' tech is impossible though, as far as everyone else in the field is concerned.
Blood from a finger prick is just not homogenous enough to give accurate levels of pretty much anything Theranos said they could test.
The most egregious thing uBiome has been accused of doing basically amounts to insurance fraud, which isn't great but also isn't on the same level as lying to customers about the accuracy of the test results they've received.
Insurance fraud isn't what made Theranos "Theranos" at all, so I wouldn't call a corp doing that "Theranos-lite".
Theranos gave patients clinical results based on technology was not accurate or reliable. The test results were practically random noise.
That is dangerous and could have seriously hurt, or killed, someone. No amount of billing fraud, however egregious, could possibly match that level of irresponsibility.
What bacteria my gut was missing or had too much of. My Firmicutes/Bacteroidetes ratio was skewed.
I then changed my diet and did several more tests to see the evolution of my gut microbiome. The periods where I felt better correspond to the test results that showed an almost normal result. When I got worse again so did the tests.
I'm thinking about pulling trigger on BiomeSight, especially since they are UK-based so far from USA and they have more strict regulation on not selling my DNA.
But other than fancy scientist lingo, did they actually give you "recommendations for food, prebiotic supplements and lifestyle adjustments based on up-to-date research findings" ? Did they give you enough real information that you could actually adjust your life for better??
Biomesight is the best 16S provider right now in my opinion. They use Jason Hawrleak reference ranges and interventions as far as I’m aware. However this sort of testing only gives you an overall picture, is pretty variable and works in percentages.
I’ve been shifting my microbiome for the best part of a year, and boy is it difficult, especially if you have non-trivial issues. I think there’s a huge space here for potential startups that can start capturing research into actionable intervention steps (nobody is doing it well at the moment).
Yeah, I got useful info. But I use other sites, like the one linked above, to analyze my data. You can download the raw data.
Their own recommendations are still pretty barebones. Still useful though, even without other sites.
It seems like health tech is the most "scammable" vertical, or is most "scam-prone"? (scam might be a strong word, bs maybe more accurate?)
Maybe it is because health-insurance billing is already so opaque and error-prone it provides cover for questionable services. Also, if the service is "free" to end-users (because it is covered by health insurance) then why not try anything in the name of self-health?
It seems the most sanctioned vertical to fake-it-till-you-make-it till you hit critical mass and then you are too big to fail because big SV names have already anointed you a winner.
Or that the fake-it-till-you-make-it has actual laws against it that get you in trouble in health, but if you are a new social media or search engine or electric scooter or ridesharing or whatever, you may get into some trouble but not as much. The health industry has a lot more laws about telling the truth and getting consent, than most industries, and they're enforced better.
pmuch this. My experience is specifically devices/MDDS, but Facebook style “We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly” [0] is one of the biggest sins possible.
As a founder in the health-tech space (sleep-tech/neuro-tech in particular), I think it's more than just related to health-insurance.
My take is it isn't just the tech side of health that is scammy. In sleep and neuro, we see all sorts of products which make outrageous claims that they say are backed by "science" from leading research organizations, but when you go looking for the research, there is nothing there!
I think sometimes people want to believe their own BS. I wonder how often the people selling/peddling their wares believe what they are saying, or just don't care.
We're being very cautious in our GTM to make sure we build a lasting and trusted company at https://soundmind.co
We're beginning by focusing just on slow-wave oscillations, and we can directly measure the impact we are having on those through the EEG in our headband - what was the response to a stimmed SWO vs a non-stim/sham SWO.
We're starting here because there is a large volume of good research in stimulating SWOs.
Does that answer your question? I've just sent you a Linkedin request if you'd like to discuss further.
Absolutely, our target markets don't overlap much (in the early stages) so people who are coming to us for specific issues, we will be recommending to sleep labs.
However, built into how we are going to market, it is doubtful we will have many people who are looking for solutions to their sleep problems. Ignore our current landing page, that is a broad generalization, we will update to be much more specific when the time is right.
Kinda, we're not just measuring sleep, we use auditory stim to improve deep sleep. We're not sure how much data we'll be giving to users, as we don't believe most people benefit from more info about sleep.
At the same time, we are discussing internally giving access to the full data suite for users who do need it. For example, we're working with some researchers, and have interest from air force, etc. who want the full data.
Do you have thoughts on what you loved about having the info from Zeo? Do you use another tracker now?
I use Oura as well as our headband to compare how good our classification is, but I don't find the data itself valuable.
Interesting tech. I help run a business that works with a lot of professional athletes who are interested in improving their sleep quality. We do a lot of the data analysis using various wearables and methods in our middleware; we'd be interested in all the data to evaluate impact and in A:B tests (like we already do with other interventions). I'll reach out to you via Linkedin unless you drop your email here.
I was tracking how many times I woke up at night, how fast I fell asleep and how much deep sleep I got. Not nearly enough for my age as it turned out. Used the data to find out what could improve my sleep. (Exercising in the morning or evening, no big meals before bedtime, etc). Quantified self basically.
I currently use the sleepcycle app. Not nearly as useful as an actual EEG headband.
Maybe consider also giving full access to people like me? Like a dev mode or something.
The non-EEG devices are getting pretty good at that data, your phone next to your bed, not so much...
EEG is probably overkill for most people, but it is the only way to detect SWO, and other parts of sleep we want to manipulate via sound. Plus, having a band on your head with bone conduction gives us an easy way to get sound stim to you.
We'll have something in the future which is more generalized to a larger audience, but we're focused on a few groups that need what we're doing atm.
During your deepest sleep, there are bursts of brain activity called Slow Wave Oscillations. These SWOs are responsible/related to memory consolidation, clearing of amyloid plaques, regulating hormonal response, and more.
When we detect an SWO, we provide a sound (auditory stimulation) and the response of your brain to the sound is to increase the power of the SWO by up to 40%. Much of the existing research measures the improved cognitive response of an individual post sleeping with stim, compared to baseline and sham.
On my task list this month is to write a whitepaper which describes the stim and points to a bunch of the different research (there is lots of it). I'm writing the whitepaper in order to make it easy to understand for investors, and give them a jumping off point to get deeper in the research, should they want to do that.
I'll potentially publish it broader if there is an audience for it.
Yeah, it is surprisingly hard to make a headband that using a standard headband design that stays on. It's one of the things we've struggled with in industrial design. Getting something that is comfortable enough, yet fits.
We think we've got it, but we need to get it on more heads (we have enough testers...).
I'll post about it once we confirm we've got it working, and have our patents in.
I think a key aspect to make it stay on would be to basically make it like a set of helmet straps. One around the head like the zeo, a chin strap and a top vertical strap across the head. A headstrap works when your awake, but when your asleep you do actions like mash your forehead into a pillow and move your head up or down, which was a perfect action to remove the zeo.
You covered the main driving reasons that involve insurance. I think there are also factors inherent to medicine that make health tech “scammable”.
There are few objective truths in medicine. Our understanding of human health is still fairly basic. On top of that, many of our best interventions, drugs, and procedures produce only middling results. When the state of the art is poor, it’s easy to sell a vision for improvement.
Measuring the success of health tech is very difficult. What does product market fit look like for early cancer detection? From afar, it may seem as if success for a cancer screening company should be simple to measure: how many cancers can the technology/company detect?
That’s not the case. In medicine there are always confounding factors. For example, in cancer detection, many cancers are low threat (not the same as benign). Identifying a cancer that is unlikely to threaten your life, or worse a false positive result, will end up making your health worse. You will undergo unnecessary biopsies and stress until the issue is resolved.
You might think: OK, but that’s measuring the wrong thing, the real metric to measure is how much longer those patients live with or without the cancer screening tech. You’d be right, but accurately measuring that takes 5+ years.
All this is to say, health tech is a difficult path, perhaps the most difficult path to production in all of tech. Along that road, there are many opportunities for unethical operators to cut corners.
> Maybe it is because health-insurance billing is already so opaque and error-prone it provides cover for questionable services.
At least in America, it seems a consequence of the stratified, multi-party market.
Each participant only has limited visibility into the entire stack, which allows scams to appear more legitimate than they might in industries where each participant has a better view of the whole.
Also, as you say, it's just ridiculously manual for data entry. :-( But slowly getting better. But that means that the sort of heavyweight detection or correction algorithms one would use elsewhere would just spew nonstop false positives.
On the Medicare side, rampant attempts, but also pretty constant auditing. It's a hard problem, but it does have a lot of people whose sole job it is to investigate it (on both the CMS and insurance provider sides).
I think part of it is the industry at large has a speculative and probabilistic nature to development. Much of it is betting on yet to be developed science, so so you rarely have a prototype that can be tested and infected. This is certainly the case for devices and drugs. When you couple this lack of objective performance data with an opaque and extremely entrenched Market sector, there's a lot of room for shady business.
To top it off, when Healthcare start up over-promise and under-deliver it gets a level of criticism and outrage that is higher then many other sectors
IMHO it doesn't help that the middle class in California especially are health obsessed. Couple that with a kind of contrarian or rationalist/conspiratorial mindset in the public intellectuals(think Phil Dick or even Musk/Thiel -- I wanted to say not medically knowledgeable but you have got various Stanford profs too) -- you get healthcare very ripe.. eg cancer warnings on pretty much every consumable? "Science" is like a means to what an end!
This was one of the very stupid things about California. You'd have buildings with warnings that the upholstery in the chairs was manufactured using chemicals known to cause cancer, but have no idea what that actually meant. Are other chairs any safer? Am I at risk if they wash the fabric first? Is there any meaningful lower bound to the risk? What chemical is it, exactly?
This is part of the problem. None of these investors, including YC, have domain expertise. They only preach that the founders themselves should have it, but they are the ones giving the funding. So, in the end, they only look a perceived credentials of the founder and not the tech, which is BS. No one with strong credentials and solid tech would need VC funding, they already have grants. And by then, private equity would be lining up.
My hypothesis is that those biotech companies which pitch to YC, largely a tech/Silicon Valley incubator, are more likely to be, if not scams, then embrace the “move fast, break things” mentality which for biotech can be either dangerous or bullshit (100+ “therapy” and “mental wellness” apps)
The opposite would be BionTech, there it took years of mRNA research, and a pandemic, to get their breakthrough. There is tech and there is tech it seems.
Funny, with a name so close to uBeam you'd think someone would pick up on the joke. There is some precedent for German residents extradited to the United States, it all depends on how grave the crime is (fraud is explicitly mentioned) and on reciprocity, ie if the same crime were enacted with the countries reversed whether or not the extradition would happen as well.
Regardless: marrying to avoid extradition may work, but it may also work against you if it appears that the marriage was a sham to avoid extradition. Finally, the US is required to cooperate in order to give up your US citizenship, which for fugitives they are unlikely to do.
Fundamentally, article 16 of the German constitution explicitly prohibits extraditions of German citizens. Of course, there are precedents in certain cases of severe crimes but the legal barriers are high.
But they're not, at least, not yet afaics and as I wrote above if the only reason you obtain that citizenship is to avoid prosecution in your home country you might just lose it again.
I'm curious how you arrived at that impression? YC has funded thousands of startups and as far as I know there have been very few bad eggs. Occasionally they've had to disown one, but it's surprisingly rare. I don't know if there were any signs of uBiome being bad when YC funded them in 2014.
Lol I like how you sneak in here like a regular commenter. Due to how close you are to YC I don't think I could in good faith try to convince you one way or the other, its just an outsiders perspective from someone who has been here just as long as you, but is not employed by YC, that's all
Not too often (although Dreamworld, Balto, and Zenefits come to mind) given the scale. What is more troubling to me than outright scams is just brand dilution and noise. The classes have been rising and show no signs of stopping. With 300 companies per class now, I get the impression it’s a numbers game (we just need one big win to make up for all the duds) than anything really mission-driven.
Returns are the mission as a fund. If you have this enormous pool of capital due to well placed bets (which YC has), would you not, over time, make more speculative bets to win even more over time? As your scale grows, the odds of suboptimal choices increases (even with domain expertise assisting in due diligence).
The reputational risk is minimal, and bad eggs can be written off as mistakes/chance character failures.
Sure, in a vacuum where reputation is neither cumulative or tarnished beyond social repair you might be right, but that is not how it plays out. Enough bad bets and you won't see anything special in joining as the resources are spread too thin and the barrier too low.
Myself, and a large number of folks I know in medicine, microbiology, etc. were pretty worried when it turned out they were doing most of their work without an IRB back in 2013.
I’m not sure if she is a German citizen? That seems a bit quick. I’d assume it has something to do with her medical condition and him (the citizen) being her caretaker instead.
Caught my eye too... in theory possible if they had fled 2019, but only barely. You need 2 years of marriage and 3 years of residence in Germany to get it.
Early naturalization for spouses in Germany can happen after 3 years of legal residence, but they only moved mid-2020 according to wikipedia, so she shouldn't be a citizen just yet.
However, extraditing just her (cannot extradite him, he is a citizen) will be probably hard due to technicalities and bureaucracy. The health condition may be a factor in a German court decision. Furthermore the alleged crimes and penalties are a major hurdle... According to the twitter thread, she'd face up to 95 years imprisonment, which creates two legal problems for any extradition: It is a vastly longer sentence than what she'd face in Germany for equivalent crimes - so a German court might require assurances first that in the US she wouldn't face a maximum sentence so vastly different than one she'd face in Germany [0] - and 95 years could be considered by a German court as an effective death sentence and Germany does not allow death sentences - this was the case when Turkey wanted some PKK people extradited on terrorism charges, and had agreed to max life imprisonment without parole instead of a death penalty, but the highest German court then ruled against extradition, saying life imprisonment without parole / likely death in prison is equivalent to a death sentence, as it removes any hope for the prisoner to one day become a free person again, and considered that cruel and inhumane[1].
I'd think she might not have been extradited yet because behind the scenes the US and Germany might be still haggling about what charges with what maximum sentences she might be charged under, before the German state prosecutor office files for extradition on behalf of the US. If she manages to become naturalized before that, that may mean game over for any extradition.
Germany could refuse naturalization based on her alleged criminal behavior, but that's unlikely, as she wasn't convicted and as the alleged crimes are non-violent; Germany will usually only refuse naturalization of spouses when there have been previous convictions or solid allegations of extremist and/or grossly violent crimes.
[0] E.g. Puigdemont, one of the leaders of the Catalonian separatist movement, was requested to be extradited from Germany to Spain on the charge of "rebellion". German courts found that there is no equivalent crime in the German penal code, and refused to extradite on this charge. Spain would have had to drop the rebellion charge, and have him extradited on the lesser misuse of public funds charge, which they weren't willing to do, so the extradition proceedings were aborted.
It's very odd. If they had not committed insurance fraud they could have done pretty well. Just saying what your microbiome is and then offering up probiotics, vitamins, supplements and food etc... with the standard disclaimer that this is not medical advice.
They usually can still be prosecuted for crimes committed abroad by the local justice system, as if the crime had occurred within the country's borders.
> France is the same, as they claim the US system favors the rich and is unfair (or so I’ve heard)
No need to make it about the US, France doesn't extradite its citizens to any other country. It has nothing to do with any claim regarding the US legal system.
“Grapevine is true. What they are doing is extremely questionable. They are billing insurance thousands of dollars for tests that are rudimentary and only look at absence or presence of microbes.”
Yes, Theranos was headquartered in SV, but, the vast majority of the investment money came from outside. (The only SV money was some very early stuff from Draper, which was a relatively small amount, and some later money from Larry Ellison.)
Yes, George Schultz lives in SV, but he's not of SV.
For the affirmative: Holmes was a Stanford student; the company was located in Palo Alto; she grew up idolizing Steve Jobs and thought she was emulating his approach; early investors were Tim Draper (personally or via DFJ? It’s not clear to me), Ellison and ATA.
For the negative: Draper’s investment was a super-early, “family and friends” investment when the company was just a “promising idea”, kinda like a YC investment, and he didn’t invest again; Ellison isn’t a VC and was also just excited by the concept and the founder; other than Draper, none of the main SV VCs invested - i.e., Sequoia, KP, Bessemer, Graylock, Benchmark, Accel, General Catalyst, Index, etc, or even any smaller ones with any pedigree (ATA was a new firm in 2004 and is now defunct, and never had any repute); most of the funding, even quite early, and especially later, came from sources outside SV, eg Murdoch, politics figures, and other non-SV investment firms - you just wouldn’t raise funds from those kinds of sources if you were making it as a conventional Silicon Valley startup.
The "D" in DFJ is Draper, which I mentioned. (DFJ has renamed itself to "Threshold.") I missed ATA.
DFJ/Threshold did the seed round, $500k, but doesn't seem to have invested afterwards. ATA did B, at $9.1M, and was a minority investor in C, which totaled $28.5M; Ellison was the C lead and there was a third.
In short, maximum for DFJ, ATA, and Ellison from those three rounds is <$40M. (Rupert Murdoch did A, $5.8M.)
Theranos raised a total of $1.4B. $40M, aka <3%, is in the noise, and the fact that it was early not late says that SV wasn't interested.
This really needs a "XYZ's law" label by now: If someone didn't see it, or doesn't remember seeing the reporting a year ago, or doesn't remember the headline accurately, it's the fault of the evil media not reporting things.
In fairness, the evil media is pretty picky and choosy on what it wants to make damn sure you know and think, and what it hopes you don’t know and think. Hence the term.
Not sure it necessarily applies in this case though.
Health care and medicine isn't a "fake it till you make it" type of industry, but that's the entire model that's preached in the startup world. So, almost by definition, startups + health care is really ripe for fraud and deception.