What's Your RealAge? A way for drug companies to market to you

Everything else
1

I’m not sure if this should go here or politics. Doesn’t seem too political.

Anyway, since I saw a RealAge banner ad here, it seemed like a good thing to give a heads up on.

The jist:

But while RealAge promotes better living through nonmedical solutions, the site makes its money by selling better living through drugs.

Pharmaceutical companies pay RealAge to compile test results of RealAge members and send them marketing messages by e-mail. The drug companies can even use RealAge answers to find people who show symptoms of a disease — and begin sending them messages about it even before the people have received a diagnosis from their doctors.

While few people would fill out a detailed questionnaire about their health and hand it over to a drug company looking for suggestions for new medications, that is essentially what RealAge is doing.

2

That site is full of crap.

I made up a profile that I was 5 foot - 500 lbs, had a ton of heart attacks, smoked 3 packs of cigs a day, chewed a metric-ton of tobacco per day, smoked 8 cigars a day - had strokes, Cirrhosis of the liver, kidney failure, diabetes with incontrollable sugar issues, had blood pressure that would kill giraffe, took no meds, got no exercise, had every mental problem in the book, get almost no sleep, refuse to eat fruits, vegetables and. Have no pets, 10 types of cancer, and am a pimple popping, skin flaking, pants pissing, friendless hermit.

Their results?
Calendar age = 39.6
Realage = 52.9

3

Wait, you mean if I fill out a questionnaire on some questionable looking click-through web site and give them my e-mail address, I might get spammed by OTHER companies?

I am SHOCKED!

SHOCKED I tell you…

4

But your life expectancy if you behave that way is 53 so it’s somewhat accurate.

5

Not even close. A person with those attributes should have a life expectancy of 5 minutes.

6

What if they dug a pond?

7

Hopefully 80 years :)

8

Dude, you should stop smoking. It’s not good for you.

9

Just out of curiosity, and purely out of curiosity, I ask you…Why? Why did you do that?

10

The real profile I ran for myself showed a generous life expectancy. So I decided to make the worst profile possible to see what the difference would be and it only got worse by ~6 months.

QT3 is a very analytical environment so I’m kinda surprised I’m the only person who’d want to validate how accurate a huge site like that is? I mean, if you’re told you can be the most disgusting and unhealthy person on Earth, and at age 40 you still have a good decade or two left at your current rate of self-immolation… well that’s not much of a wake-up call to fix your bad habits is it? On this planet it’s evident most people won’t plan or think beyond next week, let alone next decade.

XPav… you know I don’t smoke right? Can’t always tell when people are kidding or not :-)