People Accuse Quizzify of a Lot of Things*

Al Lewis
12 hours ago
3 min read

But being behind the times is not one of them.* Quite the opposite: we are usually far ahead of the conventional wisdom. The FDA just announced that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) does not increase the risk of breast cancer. Millions of women, including my wife, were denied access to, discouraged from, or failed to seek HRT because of this concern, expressed as a Black Box warning – the highest level of side effect/adverse event warning. (Without actually getting a prescription, I can't find a good image of the actual warning, so a rather blurred one is reproduced at the end.)

Quizzify knew this two years ago. We did an entire quiz on the benefits (and a few risks) of HRT. We included this question:

We also included several other questions to increase literacy on HRT, like this one.

*Try naming a single one. Fact is, no one has ever accused us of anything other than being the most cost-effective employee benefit.

Quizzify is always ahead of the conventional wisdom

It's not just HRT. We were warning of the risks of opioids when wellness vendors (Optum in this example) were still recommending "pain programs." (In all fairness, there were two wellness vendors – Virgin Pulse/Personify and Vitality – not recommending pain programs.)

Meanwhile, we were asking questions like this one and this customizable EAP one to educate employees on their hazards, rather than encouraging unvetted physician-led pain programs, which were more often than not, intentionally or not, creating more addiction.

A recent example is Microplastics. We offered that quiz before most people even knew what microplastics were. In case you are wondering why this is an important topic, try this question:

Yet another recent example is food dyes. Many are so disgusting that they will be made illegal soon. We've already been featuring questions like this one:

Even so, where we've been farthest ahead is in categories that can save you money by discouraging potentially harmful overuse of healthcare. Here is a snippet from an earlier blog post with links to the many, many ways we've called out the US healthcare system for overtesting, overdiagnosing, overtreating, and overprescribing:

The only thing that annoys people more than someone who is wrong all the time is someone who is right all the time.

But if you’re going to run a company based on facts, you darn well better be right all the time. And we are. We solved surprise bills for non-electives. We exposed a popular toothpaste containing a (subsequently removed) pesticide. We urged employees to decline hydroxychloroquine ten weeks before the FDA did. We challenged the wellness industry establishment to retract two of their go-to recommendations -- to avoid olive and other table/cooking oils, and also to eat nonfat yogurt. (Both pieces of advice have now been removed from most risk assessments.)

We’ve also been subsequently proven right about stents, annual checkups on healthy employees, CT scan overuse, heartburn pills taken daily, and, most recently (meaning June 22), the massive amount of overtreatment in this country,

And, of course, there is our go-to question set (here's one example) on why most cavities don't have to be filled...and yet they are because filling cavities is vastly more profitable than painting a little silver diamine fluoride (SDF) on them.

We've been educating employees on SDF since 2015. It wasn't until 2018 that the FDA caught up with us and labeled SDF a "Breakthrough Therapy."

So, if you are genuinely interested in improving your employees' well-being with a thoroughly evidence-based intervention that is easy to implement, easy to run and easy to pay for, we're the ones for you.

Here is the "Black Box" warning on Breast Cancer and HRT: