23andme does not sell clinical diagnostic services, period.
If you are going to make really important decisions regarding your health or that of your descendants then you should really look elsewhere. You're not capable of interpreting the results and without a second scan you don't even know if the results are yours.
This is really not an area where - unless you are qualified in the field - you should 'self medicate', the risks are way too large.
> The 23andme results let us safely skip having an extra procedure performed.
I think you're putting much more faith in them than is warranted, and that's where for me the risk lies of services like these (besides the very obvious privacy issues).
> (Note that this is not going out on a limb: screening for Tay-Sachs is strongly recommended by ACOG when both parents are known to be carriers.)
You keep making statements referring to _me_ that are inaccurate, but would be correct if you scoped them to "the average consumer" or "an untrained individual." First, I've got more than enough biology training to interpret it - a bachelors + a small amount of graduate study looking at analysis of chip-based genetic and protein assays. (Not my day job. I certainly wouldn't claim to be qualified to do this for anyone else.)
Second, I certainly do have high confidence that the results are mine. That's actually one of the cool things about a larger assay: I spotted a second cousin in the ancestry components of the list, and the maternal components match exactly with what I know.
The remaining issue is simply knowing what their false positive & negative rate is on the carrier status reports. I don't know, but given that we have a pretty good prior that I wasn't likely to be a carrier, it was sufficient for our purposes. (And, in fairness to 23andme, that's one part the FDA is letting them continue to provide.)
All of the concerns you've expressed make sense in general. I absolutely wouldn't encourage anyone to do this without talking to their doctor.
So, then maybe if you're so exceptional you should state these things up front rather than to add them afterwards to bolster your position.
23andme is there for the general consumer, not for you specifically.
Of course there are exceptions to every rule, I'm well aware of that and accept that there may be some extreme edge cases for which 23andme makes sense. But you make it seem like your situation is 'normal satisfied consumer' at first and then add more and more information to move it into 'extremely exceptional satisfied consumer' territory.
> I spotted a second cousin in the ancestry components of the list, and the maternal components match exactly with what I know.
If you are going to make really important decisions regarding your health or that of your descendants then you should really look elsewhere. You're not capable of interpreting the results and without a second scan you don't even know if the results are yours.
This is really not an area where - unless you are qualified in the field - you should 'self medicate', the risks are way too large.
> The 23andme results let us safely skip having an extra procedure performed.
I think you're putting much more faith in them than is warranted, and that's where for me the risk lies of services like these (besides the very obvious privacy issues).
> (Note that this is not going out on a limb: screening for Tay-Sachs is strongly recommended by ACOG when both parents are known to be carriers.)
Yes, it is.