navigenics

Navigenics clearly states that it accepts no responsibility in all contexts —including medical advice. Thus, no responsible physician can promote Navigenics. Yet, Navigenics continues to promote themselves as “partnering with physicians” to provide their “Health Compass” service to “ensure state-of-the-art medical advice” and to “help you make informed, personal health decisions.” Left unchallenged, these statements will continue until they are assumed true. Thus, no responsible physician may practice non-participation. I have yet to see one single actionable medical claim about Navigenics—a fact explicitly expresses in their Terms and Conditions  and never contradicted by Navigenics‘ medical director, Michael Nierenberg. Thus, in a “partnership” between Navigenics and a physician, Navigenics gets all the money and the credit, the patient gets to pay more for less care, and the physician gets all the liability and the work of producing the medical advice. This is your roll in the “medical revolution” pledged to you by your bleached-out BIZDEV! “friends.” Participate, and you’re either a sucker or a sellout —not a responsible physician.Worst of all, Navigenics thinks that they can sell “medicine that’s not medicine” through clever marketing and physician partnerships, enriching Navigenics now while they dodge the liability of medical responsibility later. For the same reasons that credit-swapping “insurance that’s not insurance” should have never been tolerated, this kind of “is isn’t” sophistry sets an industry precedent by which one may sell  a promise now without accepting any of the expected future value of liability already built into the system to prevent abuse. Like insurance, since preventive medical advice is an abstract promise, once the precedent of accepting no liability has been set and successfully tested, non-liable preventive medical advice can be infinitely created and sold with no physical limits… until the system breaks. Understandably, some people will be less likely to trust non-liable advice. The solution is to package non-liable advice with liable, trusted medical institutions until the public is so confused that it is unable to sort reality from fiction. Finally, once the business model of selling free and infinite non-liable medical assets by packaging them with and laundering them through trusted medical advice has been sufficiently demonstrated to the investment community, responsible ventures will not be competitive for investment capital.Thus begins the great genomic industry sellout race to zero trust. At the end, disposable start-up companies like Navigenics cash out and collapse (or just collapse), and surviving trusted institutions of medicine get stuck with the loss.Navigenics is an unprofitable venture-funded web start up created by Silicon Valley investors to test the limits of the personalized medicine market. I propose that the physician community compose the results of that test.