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

[Iused2BanOptimist]

A commercial blood test company decided to take on Margaret McCartney and told her to behave.
Great way to tout for business. Not sure how new the company is but they joined twitter on 26/10/18 and are already at the centre of a tweet storm!

Link to the twitter thread. Enjoy!
twitter.com/bengoldacre/status/1058344890466254848?s=21

OP - might you ask MNHQ to change the thread title to include Margaret McCartney's name, please?

There's a lot of respect for her and I think people might be interested to learn this is happening.

Do I just self report and ask? Will do. It is indeed interesting partly for the bad PR but also for the wider interest in commercial testing and the activities of private laboratory companies.

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

Holy crap! The BMJ, broadsheet newspapers and NICE all need to get on to this. (Is that firm's twitter run by a pal of Dr Haddock? The misogynistic, patronising tone seems all too familiar.)

Sending out the batsignal to @Bowlofbalelfish - this looks like it overlaps your area of expertise.

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

How strange. My thoughts exactly.

i wonder.

Yes, the language is certainly reminiscent of other controlling persons. Where do they learn it I wonder?

Good for Ben Goldacre coming out to support Margaret McCartney. MedLab has really upped the ante:

Margaret McCartney has made misleading statements about our company which are false, defamatory and damaging. Regrettably, it appears it stems from her misunderstanding that MedLab.com is a private screening company. It is not.

twitter.com/medlab/status/1058378916719747072

I have to admit, I am notorious recognised as someone who can grasp fine detail but MedLab's distinction is passing me by when they assert that they are not a private screening company but a company that offers private testing to private individuals without medical referral.

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

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

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

Medlab website currently 'under maintenance'

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

Isn't there just

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).

Thanks arranfan and FT.

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

Autocorrect changed'them' to 'the men' sorry

This all feels very strange, indeed.

@bowlofbabelfish

(Misspelling upthread.)

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

What an odd company

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

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.

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.

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

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