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Comment by crygin | Hacker News Reader

Heh, this is, bluntly... untrue. In medicine, certain types of published studies are sometimes peer-reviewed, and sometimes people care about that, and that's about the extent of peer review as far as validity goes. Drug studies are not peer-reviewed in any meaningful way, and that's about as statistically strong a claim as exists in most of medicine. Medtech (implants, mechanisms, Theranos-like processes, etc) are certainly never "peer-reviewed".

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Why not? Everything I've read about Theranos seems to suggest she should have been subjecting some part of her process to peer review.

“I don’t know if she’s another Steve Jobs,” said Jerry Yeo, professor of pathology at the University of Chicago and director of the Clinical Chemistry Laboratories there. “You have to subject yourself to peer review. You can’t just go in a stealthy mode and then announce one day that you’ve got technology that’s going to disrupt the world.”

Professor Yeo said that he and his colleagues wanted to see data and testing in independent labs. “We have a small army of people ready and willing to test Theranos’s products if they’d ask us,” he said. “And that can be done without revealing any trade secrets.” [1]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/business/the-narrative-fra...

That's only true if you don't consider FDA approval to be a form of peer review.

Although in theory FDA approval should be equivalent to scientific peer review, in practice it doesn't seem to be.

It's not unusual for independent testing to show effects significantly smaller than those reported in the clinical trials that lead to FDA approval.

Sometimes the results approach placebo levels.

drug studies (or medtech) might not need to be peer-reviewed, but their underlining principles / entity / mechanism are peer-reviewed as scientific discovery. T is totally not the case. in fact its claim for using tiny amount of blood for medical diagnostics and its clinical results are disputed and questioned by comparing to its peers in peer-reviewed journals.

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