Zoomedia Blog

default image goes here

Posted by Barbara Lavery on April 9, 2008 at 3:37 am

This week and next, my favorite shopping haunts in Soho are sharing space with Navigenics, the personalized DNA testing company. I usually visit SoHo for frocks at Legacy, cocktails at Thom Bar, and sushi at Blue Ribbon, but this week I can go to Soho and provide saliva in a cup to find out what my genes might tell me about the future of my health. Navigenics is renting space in a Soho storefront to promote its groundbreaking products.

But do I really want to know the 17 diseases and conditions, including breast cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and type 2 diabetes I might be prone to contracting? I think I do, but I’m not sure - I already have risk factors in my family history that I should pay attention to, and sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. I recently saw David Duncan present his genetic risk for cardiovascular disease – oddly enough, as he talked about his high risk and the need to manage his diet, he was slurping from a Coke can, so there you go...

I guess I’m hesitant to know too much more about myself than I do, because my dance card is pretty full as it is. I really should know, and maybe one day soon I will spit for science, but I have some thinking to do first. The challenge for me, as for everyone else, will be in changing our behavior - a difficult task in a society that has been led to expect there is a pill for everything, a society bombarded with advertising for less-than-healthy foods...

What I do know is the dilemma will likely result in some shopping therapy a la Catherine Malandrino - and for those who really know me, they know I'm genetically inclined to shopping in SoHo...

Tags: Patient Strategy, Web 2.0

Recent Blog Posts

Contact|Zoomedia Blog|Newsletter Signup|Client Login

© Zoomedia, Inc. 2009