Dr Margaret McCartney told to behave [Edited by MNHQ at OP's request]

It is interesting that they’ve targeted McCartney. Looks like they want to shut her up through intimidation and threats of legal action.

I'm sure the "real" unrelated company will have spotted it.

Sorry - wasn't clear. Yes, Ben's already on top of the appalling tweets, I was wondering whether he'd spotted the peculiar existence of what seems to be two separate companies with the same name.

Ben seems to be on it already.

I hope Ben Goldacre gets on this. After all he was the one who bought a PhD for his (deceased) cat from the same correspondence "college" Gillian McKeith obtained hers from. She tried to sue, if memory serves me, lost and had to remove the title "Dr" from all the packaging for her range of merchandise.

Sounds like Ben could usefully do some digging here - are there in fact two entirely different companies with the same name?

This is all very suspect.

I can't believe the tone, trekking Dr McCartney to "behave", and feet and over again too.

Sorry, cross posted with OldCrone
The one man company officer ( Greg Gormley) also ran another company, same business address.

Not into blood testing but housing. All in the public domain may I add.
companiesintheuk.co.uk/ltd/bowood-homes-uk

I think the fishy Medlab is not the same Medlab as the one in Derby which has been going since the 1950s.

Using the same name as a long standing company can have implications. Perhaps that is why the fishy website is down.
"Duff lawyer" needs to read up a bit really. Tsk. Tsk.

Very familiar rhetoric though from fishy Medlab, and such a familiar technique, in trying to silence a woman who knows her subject well.

I found a company which was set up on 22nd October, pombear. I can't see any links to Solvay and Rhodia. The one I found seems to be a one-man company.
beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/11635767
One of the google results for medlab.com gives that company number on the google page, but it links to the under maintenance page. The cached page is all about Bautista Notaries in Gibraltar

Cached version of the medlab.com website.
<a class="break-all" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4cebbuXjj6wJ:www.medlab.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=opera" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4cebbuXjj6wJ:www.medlab.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=opera

For those readers who may not know some of the additional history here:

Dr McCartney recently had a piece in the bmj that was 'gender critical'
www.bmj.com/content/360/bmj.k1312

Which is why the language used against her in this twitter spat is even more interesting.

Context is all! There are striking similarities in the tone and policing aimed against her, and that elsewhere.

Regardless of that, this is messy, really messy. Med Lab had a fully functional, if somewhat bare of credibility and governance content, before this evening when it suddenly went 'under maintance'.

If the Companies House information is linked to the right organisation, interesting links to Solvay and Rhodia. Too late and too tired to investigate further, but all very odd, given their twitter approach and website disappearance.

Free there is something called the Wilson Criteria which sets out areas which screening tests need to meet. The statistics of it are important but there are other factors too. For example, does treatment exist for the condition being screened for? Even a statistically perfect test may not meet the criteria for being a good screening test if it detects a disease for which no treatment exists.
The issue with private companies offering these tests is that they don’t have access to NHS records so interpretation can be flawed and the default position is usually “go and see your GP” which takes up time and NHS resources. The argument someone on the Twitter thread made about people only having tests if they are sufficiently worried and are likely to be symptomatic is not helpful either as often the point of a screening test is to pick up a disease prior to symptoms presenting.
This is a real bugbear of mine (as you can probably tell)! I have enough of my own work to be getting on with before I start trying to sort out what to do with abnormal results from tests I haven’t requested.

Who says 'behave' to an adult? Is Kenneth Williams running their Twitter?

What an odd company

Very odd. The tone of their tweets is certainly reminiscent of someone.

@bowlofbabelfish

(Misspelling upthread.)

This all feels very strange, indeed.

Autocorrect changed'them' to 'the men' sorry

Odd for a company to set up a company twitter account with a link to a website before they have a website. They are being a bit cagey about who works for the men as well

Thanks arranfan and FT.

Free in a nutshell, any test will have false positives (people without the disease who are wrongly told they have a disease or risk factor) and misses (people with the disease who don't show up as I'll), as well as correct diagnoses and correct rejections (clean bill of health).

A useful test has high numbers of hits and rejections and low numbers of false alarms and misses. What counts as an acceptable false alarm rate or miss rate depends on the costs and benefits of treatment - if a test has a high false alarm rate, the treatment has nasty side effects and the disease itself rarely has fatal consequences then the risks from unnecessary treatment may outweigh the benefits of correct treatment at a population level.

Often routine screening of whole populations rather than only testing people displaying symptoms fails this sort of risk-benefit test (eg antigen tests for prostate cancer).

Medlab website currently 'under maintenance'

There is something unpleasantly familiar about the lab's language I think

Isn't there just

What's the background to taking blood tests from asymptomatic people?

Margaret McCartney's thread should serve as a decent backgrounder:

threadreaderapp.com/thread/1055785400193765376.html

What's the background to taking blood tests from asymptomatic people?

(I did languages so it's riiiight over my head).