They also question the legality of these direct-to-consumer laboratories.
The store, called QuestDirect and owned by Quest Diagnostics, the largest diagnostic laboratory in the United States, is one of a growing number of direct-to-consumer laboratories that are opening up across the country and on the Internet.
Direct-to-consumer laboratories in those states sometimes follow the letter of the law but not the spirit, skirting the laws by hiring doctors to sign the requisitions, usually without ever seeing the patients.
The agency is weighing regulations on test kits sold directly to consumers, laboratory tests and software that analyses raw genetic data.
Dr. John Halsey, a clinical immunologist in Kansas City, Kan., who started a direct-to-consumer laboratory and then sold it to Quest, said: "Traditionally, if you wanted your cholesterol taken, you'd have to go to the doctor, sit in his waiting room for a half hour.
Yet sales of DVD players proclaimed as the greatest gadget to come out of consumer-electronics laboratories in decades—have remained stubbornly earthbound.When DVD was launched in November 1996, nobody expected it to take off immediately.
The result could be a happy medium to the benefit of consumers, the laboratories, the testing companies, the government and to taxpayers".
Big consumer markets become laboratories where companies know that innovations will be tested and the successful ones richly rewarded.
The third and fourth self-test categories include direct-access laboratory tests and home-collect or direct-to-consumer tests, in which a consumer attends a laboratory facility to have body material taken or sends body material to a laboratory where the test is done, after which the result is sent to them by mail or via the Internet.
Good Housekeeping magazine -- which incorporates the Good Housekeeping Institute, the consumer product evaluation laboratory founded in 1900 that tests everything from hair spray to vacuum cleaners and administers the Good Housekeeping Seal -- has a circulation of 4.6 million.
People who are not used to brands flit easily from one to another.Special report The world turned upside down First break all the rules Easier said than done Grow, grow, grow Here be dragons New masters of management The power to disrupt Sources & acknowledgmentsReprintsThis has turned great metropolises such as Shanghai into vast laboratories of consumer research.
