Diet and Nutrition. Natural Health, and Healthy Living

Ryan Phelan started DNADirect to expand the power of genetic testing to everyone, using the Web. She’s been ploughing a tough furrow but been making some real progress in the last few years, including getting an investment from Lemhi Ventures and working with Humana to provide genetic testing to its members (and the utilization management going along with it), to go along with their initialDTC approach.

Late last week DNADirect was purchased by Medco. I spoke with Ryan and Robert Epstein, Chief Medical Officer of Medco to get just a taste of what this will mean for the future of DNA testing within Medco.

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“False Hopes, Unwarranted Fears: The Trouble with Medical News Stories.” If you find the headline alarming, you should read the editorial, published just last week in PLoS Medicine. There, the journal’s editors summarize what the Health News Review has discovered over the past two years while evaluating medical stories about new products and procedures throughout the mainstream media.

“It’s not a pretty picture,” says Gary Schwitzer, the University of Minnesota School of Journalism professor who publishes the online project.

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