People who fork out money for genetic tests like these aren't windows users. I'm a linux user. I also have undergraduate and graduate degrees in biology, and my SO who also got the test done (and with whom I'm planning to have kids with) makes phylogenies for a living. We're perfectly capable of interpreting this information.
Doctors are a fine filter for stupid people, but it they can be infuriating for people like us. My mother is a biochemical engineer, and when she was pregnant with me she was so frustrated by the doctor's dissembling over her amnio, she grabbed the test results out of his hands and read them for herself.
I'm regularly frustrated with the lack of doctors' honesty. I don't need one to decide what I do and do not need to know about myself. I think we not only do we need more direct-to-consumer medical testing, I think we should have better access to our own medical information.
You would be right if the 23andme tests were accurate, but they really aren't. They only test for the most common mutations for certain genes so they don't replace going to see a clinical geneticist. Also, the vast majority of conditions you could have aren't even tested for at all. A lot of these are the kinds of things where there is only a 1 in 40,000 chance of you having it, but there are so many of them that your chances of having one of those conditions is actually pretty high. But yeah, doctors are terrible at diagnosing chronic illnesses so you really want to figure out what you have on your own and then just go to someone to order the tests for you. But 23andme wouldn't be useful for this unless you get really 'lucky' and have one of the 200 or so things they test for.
Your point on doctors is well taken - I myself hold 2 degrees, one in genetics and a second in computer science. I run whole genome sequencing analysis as part of my job and am acutely aware of the kind of knowledge required to properly interpret these kinds of results. When you consider that many MDs simply have 2 years of college's worth of molecular biology training - well it puts genetics knowledge into perspective.
Doctors are a fine filter for stupid people, but it they can be infuriating for people like us. My mother is a biochemical engineer, and when she was pregnant with me she was so frustrated by the doctor's dissembling over her amnio, she grabbed the test results out of his hands and read them for herself.
I'm regularly frustrated with the lack of doctors' honesty. I don't need one to decide what I do and do not need to know about myself. I think we not only do we need more direct-to-consumer medical testing, I think we should have better access to our own medical information.