![]() ![]() Toward the end of the lecture, I posed a question: Have the media learned their lesson after enabling Holmes’s charade? Loopholes in laboratory regulation and widespread ignorance of how blood testing works had caused medical professionals and the public to fall for diagnostic scams, I told the academics in attendance. Just last week, I was giving a grand-rounds talk about Theranos. Holmes’s rise and fall is the most glamorous scandal to hit my field in some time: Most are more body-parts-in-the-back-of-a-pickup than celebrity-stuffed financial crimes. Read: Theranos and COVID-19 testing are mirror-image cautionary talesĪs a pathologist-a doctor who specializes in laboratory testing-I’ve been following the Theranos story since the beginning. But the Times’ latest visit to Holmesville suggests that this unsafe practice is still in place. Even the Journal praised her before it damned her. Before John Carreyrou broke the bad news about the company at The Wall Street Journal, reporters were happy to write flattering profiles of Holmes with only the most rudimentary caveats. The media-and their content-delivery process-have been going through a similar postmortem over the Theranos debacle. The entire drug-delivery process, from pharmacy to bedside, is carefully inspected for unsafe practices. Errors are addressed at the system-not individual-level: If a patient receives an incorrect dose of a medicine, for instance, the blame doesn’t necessarily fall on the nurse who administered it or the physician who prescribed it. When mistakes happen in the health-care system, doctors try to trace their origin to broken processes. The emergency-medicine physician Jeremy Faust called it “ credulous drivel.” Journalists and doctors alike argued that the Times had erred by helping Holmes rehabilitate her image. The Axios editor Sam Baker picked the article apart on Twitter. She seemed, like most people, somewhere in between.” This flattering or at least ambivalent tone was not well received. ![]() Chozick writes that Holmes is “gentle and charismatic,” and “didn’t seem like a hero or a villain. The author, Amy Chozick, suggests that she was charmed by Holmes, the devoted family woman. On Sunday, The New York Times ran a profile of Holmes-which included the first interview she’s given since 2016. But there’s still a little more blood left in this stone. Holmes’s fall from grace-she was once the youngest self-made woman billionaire-has been described over and over again. In reality, when Theranos’s Edison device wasn’t exploding, it was delivering unreliable results to frightened patients. She received this punishment for misleading investors about her lab-in-a-box technology, which she claimed could run hundreds of tests on a few drops of blood. The convicted fraudster and founder of the defunct medical start-up Theranos, is waiting to begin an 11-year sentence in federal prison. ![]()
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