A few months late to the party....

This month's Internal Medicine News has Dr. Patricia Ganz on the cover.

I couldn't help but say, "Why does she look familiar???" But then I read and remembered

"Few physicians feel prepared to interpret findings from direct-to-consumer genetic tests and incorporate the results into clinical practice, according to speakers at a National Academy of Sciences workshop on DTC genetic testing."

Ahh, yes, she was at the National Academy meeting which served as the official hammer to DTC genomics....

These first intro words from the one of many articles in the Internal Medicine News about Genomics hits home

"Few physicians feel prepared to interpret findings from direct-to-consumer genetic tests" I have a serious question.

If these "tests" are for "fun" and not to be used for medicine, then why should it matter if doctors feel prepared to interpret these tests......

Should they not be interpreting these tests at all?

Since, after all, they are "not to be used for medicine".......

Well, unfortunately, the marketing firms and PR firms have pitched these little babies right next to other OTC medical treatments.......

Which means, the public will "Think" of these tests as medical.

And hell, why not?

Freaking 23andSergey is testing for the Ashkenazi Jewish BRCA founder mutations and placing the results right next to IBD, prostate cancer and heart disease, which BTW is right next to ear wax type.......

The biggest problem here is the confusion of "Medically important" with non medically important.......

When a consumer reviews important sounding stuff with non important sounding stuff, the non important looks more interesting, because it comes with stuff that "Can keep me from dying!!!!" This is the problem here.

And despite what Howard Levy of JHUMC says, I am not down with this problem continuing to exist.......we have allowed it to happen way too many times.....

My prediction is that clinicians will tune out this noise of DTC and use it as another excuse to tune out TRUE CLINICAL GENETICS......How do I know this? Because I know community physicians. They are WAYYYY different from the academic clinicians out there......

Dr Levy is incorrect in assuming that DTC will push the clinician to "Learn Genetics or Consult a geneticist"

Hell, most geneticists couldn't tell you what a heart attack and it's treatment entails these days. Unless of course they have had one. You should have seen the talk about Brugada up in New Haven, what a mess! I leave aside the IM genetics brethren here.....which are less in number than astronauts.......

And now that the team in Mountain View put out a press release about pure swill, it is all too clear to me what the hell is going on.

These guys are desperate. They need to live, or else the empowered genetics patient will die.

Or so they think.

This couldn't be further from the truth.

Genetics and Genomics is doing just fine without these boondoggles...... Do we need NYT spreads to survive and thrive? The answer: No.

Why?
1. Francis Collins is head of NIH
2. Obama proposed bills supporting Personalized Medicine
3. Major corporations are investing in useful genetic technology
4. Clinical research is progressing nicely in the PGx space
5. Clinicians like myself are organizing and practicing personalized medicine

So, I ask you "Why should we support something that distracts from the reality of genomic medicine?"

So we can have them figure out the interpretation algorithms? Well, they have shown what a complete hash of that they made...... For seven diseases, 50% or less of the predictions of two companies agreed across five individuals

So we can get the public supporting Genetics in Medicine? I think we know that the public supports us, with or without them.......In fact they support us more WITHOUT them!!! Because what the public fears can actually legally happen especially if a company goes belly up......

So they can carry out the next level of collaborative research? Have you seen the latest joke research? No thanks, I'll stick with Coriell for now...Maybe Scripps too.......

Suffice to say, from my view point on the mountain, these guys (DTC Genomics) are actually parasites, sucking the energy from the movement. They contribute nothing but hype, which now will turn to backlash......

In conclusion, this backlash will detract more from the movement than the hype added to it.

The Sherpa Says: Why continue to support something that in the long run will damage credibility with community physicians and the public? Why?