And when the word "help" means "instead of", I'll think you might have a point... but it doesn't so you don't.

I do have a point, because it's possible for one factor among several to weight someone's choice. However, you're nitpicking at my paraphrase, while ignoring the content at the link which I supplied (which was why I supplied it.

The specific claim made by 23andme, without disclaimers, is: 23andMe empowers you to better manage your health and wellness. This seems to me like a straightforward claim of diagnostic value; the fact that it's non-exclusive is beside the point.

I think whether it's exclusive is a very large part of the point.

I disagree. certainly, the risk of misdiagnosis is is inverse proportion to the degree of supplementarity, but that can still affect an awful lot of people and result in significant economic loss. It seems to me that some people want to argue this on a binary basis, ie since 23andme does not purport to replace the advice of a primary physician, its liability for misdiagnosis therefore should fall to zero. To me, though, it seems quite likely that if 23andme suggests a risk factor that is greater than the probability spread between different options offered by a patient's physician(s), then it's very likely that the 23andme data will be given excess weight given the notoriously poor grasp of Bayesian inference among the general population (and even among some groups of clinicians).

If anything, the supplementary nature of 23andme's test data should make compliance easier, since their burden will drop proportionately under the B<PL formula employed to assess tort liability in the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_negligence

I wonder if you and other folks who seem to be espousing this binary approach live in or hail from states with contributory negligence regimes.

For whatever it's worth for you to know, it would have been easy to make that same point without being nasty about it, and I think the nastiness harms your argument. "But it doesn't so you don't" makes one sound like an angry teenager; it's a wordier way of saying "so there!". You don't see a lot of adults tacking "so there!" onto the ends of their arguments, because it's a self-evidently silly thing to add.