I've been following this for awhile, and it's good to see them out releasing…

I've been following this for awhile, and it's good to see them out releasing a "product".

MetaMed uses doctors and professionals who understand statistics and the state of research to help you with your medical issues.

By using doctors and researchers who understand statistics and how to evaluate the relative importance of research findings, MetaMed provides a diagnosis, treatment recommendations, and referrals to doctors in their network who can provide the treatments best for a specific patient. MetaMed provides “evidence based medicine” rather than vague suggestions solely based on domain-general knowledge.

Why is such a thing needed?

Many doctors and medical professionals lack a basic understanding of statistics. For instance, in one study, sixteen out of twenty HIV counselors said that there was no such thing as a false positive HIV test (Gigerenzer et al 1998). Another study found that British general practitioners rarely change their prescribing patterns, and when they do, it’s not in response to evidence (Armstrong et al 1996). Gigerenzer and others have shown that statistical illiteracy is ubiquitous among patients and doctors. Many confuse sensitivity and specificity, and most physicians do not understand how to compute the positive predictive value of a test. This can cause them to overestimate the probability of someone having a disease, say breast cancer, by an order of magnitude or more.

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MetaMed — Personalized Medical Research Backed by Peter Thiel and Jaan Tallinn | Accelerating Future
Doctors, like other experts, have limited domain knowledge. The average primary care visit is only 11 minutes, a figure which hasn’t changed since the 1930s, with four minutes of that being the patien…

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