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Comment by jpmattia | Hacker News Reader

First: Congrats on attacking this space. I think there is all sorts of need in the self-managed care world.

That said (you just knew there was going to be criticism :)

> Overall, we recommend healthy lifestyle habits versus drugs to manage inflammation levels.

Such a blanket recommendation strikes me as problematic: Which "lifestyle habits" handle the case where CRP is high due to things like (say) cancer? Or mold-toxicity? Or auto-immune issues?

In constructing the company, I assume there is a general counsel talented in medical liability, which strikes me as a minefield. I also assume the very public history of Theranos is also going to invite interesting scrutiny, even though you're running a legitimate operation.

Good luck to you in any case. Self-managed care should be an interesting space over the next decade imho.

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> Or auto-immune issues?

N=1, but I have an autoimmune disease that has reacted extremely well to lifestyle (stress & diet) changes after years of expensive drugs failing. Or regression to the mean happened. Or a recent solar flare fixed what was wrong with me. Nobody knows.

Doctors are great but they’re overworked and the amount of time required to truly help patients isn’t feasible. When science doesn’t have any easy solution to your problem self care (or tons of money) is the only option - which makes it awesome to see products like those in the OP! Hopefully it’ll be a step up from a lot of the snake oil self care out there.

This! x100! Thank you for sharing your journey

> This! x100!

You can't turn N=1 into N=100 just like that ...

I do hope someone will keep an independent scientific record of how this approach actually helps people (if at all).

There's a lot of money being made in the space of nutritional supplements at the moment, and yet there is very little evidence that any of them work at all. We shouldn't let the same happen here.

>> This! x100! >You can't turn N=1 into N=100 just like that ...

You're right - I probably shouldn't have used the language I did. In retrospect I see how it was confusing. I just meant to express how happy I was that healthy lifestyle changes were helping someone. :)

> I do hope someone will keep an independent scientific record of how this approach actually helps people (if at all).

Yes! We want to contribute to the scientific literature (e.g., by identifying new lifestyle interventions that help reduce inflammation levels) and do so in a validated way!

In the meantime, we base our service on existing scientific literature regarding which lifestyle interventions are associated with decreased inflammation levels: https://www.begolden.online/post/lifestyle-interventions-ass...

Can I ask which autoimmune? I have one too and so far have been relying on drugs but want to try this inflammation / lifestyle approach.

Not GP, but try an elimination diet. I had chronic sinus headaches and cutting out a ton of foods fixed it. My brother is diagnosed celiac, I am not because you have to eat gluten for the blood test or do a stomach biopsy, both of which I'm not down to do.

Changed my life in such a significant way. Doesn't hurt to try it.

:) I love the questions - they help us improve!

You are correct that there are sources of inflammation that are not lifestyle related, but many of the drivers of inflammation are indeed lifestyle related.

I really like this article on the drivers of inflammation: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-019-0675-0

I particularly like Figure 1

I also thought I would share our blog on lifestyle interventions associated with decreased inflammation levels:

https://www.begolden.online/post/lifestyle-interventions-ass...

Curcumin is one of the main ingredients of (e.g.) Indian cuisine. Does it mean that the nation is comparatively less inflamed?

Historically? Yes, actually.

There has been a surge in, for example, IBD in India recently [1], but by and large India did not have many of the inflammatory disease issue we had for decades. They had plenty of other diseases, but I wouldn’t be surprised if all the curcumin helped stave off certain inflammatory conditions.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5988149/

I'm not against using it, but isn't technically using garlic, curcumine a sort of natural medication, more then a lifestyle change? They are both aryuvedic methods. Curcumine for sure.

Also as someone with an AI condition the baseline inflammation levels from lifestyle are important. If I eat lots of junk food it'll trigger my AI even with medication.

I'm excited by your company, and will certainly be checking it out. Are there options for more regular testing? I'd like to establish baselines on my week to week or even day-to-day. I just dont want to figure out a lab to do my own testing.

Best of luck!

Hi! Yes, you can test more frequently. Once you choose a plan, you can add as many more tests as you like at that same cost per test.

I’m heavily involved in the auto immune communities.

Eventually many people get the point that they realize diet alone can either dramatically reduce or eliminate symptoms.

Will it work 100% of the time, no.

Something like the autoimmune protocol diet is amazing at calming down inflammation.

Theranos is so huge in some people's minds because it billed itself first as a Silicon Valley style tech company, so people associated with Silicon Valley style tech companies are well aware of it.

There have been tons of companies doing things far more similar to Theranos' claims especially in the liquid biopsy space, without any negative association, partly because they bill themselves as biotech companies, and partly because their tech actually works.

The main reason Theranos was able to get away with what they claimed, was people in the industry knew what they claimed was approximately possible, just hadn't yet been done with the tech of the day.

11 years later, that tech has continuously improved. Biotech companies with interesting ideas about how to approach liquid biopsy and personalized medicine don't get extra scrutiny because of Theranos. The exception is if they are going for funding to people more familiar with Theranos than with biotech. Which is itself as much of a red flag as one needs.

> was people in the industry knew what they claimed was approximately possible, just hadn't yet been done with the tech of the day.

Everyone I know in the industry has always said that what they claimed was physically impossible, tech be damned.

There's a bunch of companies that promise impossible things like wireless power (ubeam), or super high bandwidth radio (femtocell), or handheld spectrometers that tell you how many calories are in a dish (don't remember the name).

For some reason parts of the tech community always fall for this bullshit.

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