If you could really replace 10's of mls blood draws from the arm with a few drops (< 1 ml) drawn from the fingertip with no loss of clinically usable information, it would actually be a major breakthrough. There are distressingly large number of patients in hospitals requiring once a day (or even more frequent) blood draws to maintain correct treatment. The volume of blood and availability of veins and pain threshold can become actual, serious problems very quickly. This is doubly true in children.
If such tests were somehow found, they'll be noble-prize worthy scientific breakthroughs. Somehow Theranos is not giving off that vibe sadly.
Were personal computers replacing mainframes nuts?
> It's far more painful to take blood from a finger than from the MCV in your cubital fossa (arm).
Why didn't you just call it an arm?
> Then you have to go around touching things all day with a band-aid on your fingertips,
I've never had a band-aid for a finger-prick and do them constantly for checking blood sugar. Doctors never did it either.
Personal computers never replaced mainframes. Personal computers replaced minicomputers and workstations.
The difference is meaningful, even in this context: Minicomputers and workstations were high-end systems dedicated to things like relatively small-scale file storage, graphics processing, network tasks (servers, routers), and other workloads which required neither high throughput nor long up-times. They mainly required more RAM, CPU, and, sometimes, specialized hardware than it was feasible to put on a home system of the era.
Mainframes, on the other hand, had become specialized as high-throughput high-availability systems, running large databases and supporting dozens to hundreds of users at a time, for years on end. They'd grown entire specialized architectures dedicated to handling that kind of workload, and were only getting moreso as time went on.
My point is, if Theranos is the PC, it's only going to replace some aspects of the market it's moving into, and, from this article, it might not even do that. It's just too difficult to play catch-up with the extremely specialized realms, even if you have technology which is an 80% solution for 90% of the problems.