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Woman Entrepreneur Researches Treatment Options for Medical Conditions

Posted on: Tuesday, 31 May 2005, 15:00 CDT

May 31--Batya Amit, a transplanted New Yorker, has witnessed what she considers a depersonalization of medicine over the years.

Doctors, increasingly harried by the high volume of patients, have less time to spend with each one. More importantly, she says, they have less time to research treatment options for a variety of medical conditions.

Last year, Amit decided to do something about it. She started a medical research company out of her Los Alamitos home. She calls it Healthy Finds. The company -- namely, Amit herself -- generates personalized reports giving her clients the latest research on existing and emerging treatments for any condition they may have.

She also provides extensive information on the known causes of illnesses and on prevention. Amit's clients are mostly patients seeking answers, but she says doctors are increasingly requesting her services.

Amit focuses on "integrative" medicine, which combines conventional treatments with more holistic ones. She says her clients tend to be less interested in western medicine, often because they already tried it and it had bad side effects or didn't work. She also provides the names of doctors who offer the different treatments she discusses in her reports.

Amit has no professional medical experience, but she says her skills as a researcher in the industrial world are transferable to medicine.

The Register interviewed Amit late last week.

Q: What does Healthy Finds do?

A: I'm helping people who want to make educated decisions at a time when doctors are overloaded with patients and don't have the same time as they might have had in the past to do research -- and holistic practitioners are not being checked in terms of their knowledge or their products. So people are left wondering if their treatments are safe and effective. ... Nobody is talking to them who has done objective research.

Q: What are your job qualifications?

A: I've done research my whole life. I worked for a power-tool company for eight years, and I told them how to get into different markets and what changes they had to make in different products. ... I don't have a background in health care, but I'm not claiming to. If people say "what do you recommend," I don't recommend because I'm not a health-care professional. I say only that I can find the information you need to make a decision.

Q: Where do you get your information?

A: From all over. I get it from medical journals, from integrative doctors, from newsletters, from conferences. A lot of it is from medical journals though, because that's where the research is. I also talk to doctors a lot. I can talk to four different doctors and get opinions so the patient doesn't have to go and pay for all those visits. I'm also helpful to integrative doctors because the people who read my reports are more likely to go to these doctors if they're interested in the treatments they offer and the research behind them.

Q: Do you take any money from these doctors for referrals?

A: No, I am not paid by any supplement companies, by any doctors. I don't want to be paid by any of these people because then I'm not objective anymore.

Q: So, how's business?

A: I'd say I have about six to eight (clients) a month right now.

Q: How much do you charge?

A: $54 an hour. It usually takes eight to twelve hours for each report. With cancer, it's generally eight hours. I add the eight hours onto all the previous reports I already have about cancer, so it's incremental -- they get more and more information.

Q: If you've already done several reports on the same disease, don't you run out of new things to research at some point?

A: Amazingly not. You would be surprised how much new stuff is coming out each month.

Q: Do people come to you seeking information on prevention or just on possible cures for diseases they already have?

A. Both. Last week someone came to me and said he kept getting these pre-cancerous moles, and his doctor said he had to get an acid wash. He said "is there anything I can do that's less drastic?" It happens that the ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 oils is a very big factor in skin cancers.

Q: Which oils are omega-6 and which ones are omega-3?

A: Omega-6 is sunflower, safflower and corn oil. ... You can get omega-3 from fish oils, but you have to get the fish-oil supplements that don't have mercury.

Q: How you can tell if a holistic treatment is for real or just some product somebody's trying to sell you?

A: You need to know before you fork out $400 on every supplement that sounds good what the research is behind these supplements and if you just change your diet, how many of these supplements will you really need. And who did the research. If the manufacturers did the research, it's different than if it's done objectively. My criteria is if it got into a respected peer-reviewed medical journal, then it's OK by me.

Q: So summing it up, what would you tell people facing major medical decisions?

A: You need to make a decision based on your comfort level, knowing the success and safety and dangers of whatever treatments you consider. You're involved in a lot of decisions in your life. You should have the same involvement in your health decisions, rather than going by an emotional reaction where you trust a particular doctor or particular holistic doctor. You might like the people a lot, but it doesn't mean the product being offered is what you want to put in you.

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Source: The Orange County Register

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