▦
Article image
Health tech
What a start-up pitch deck leaves out
Reading a press release the way you read a chart: looking for what is missing.
Carlotta Rinke
Novelist
I spent thirty years in medicine, and the last stretch of it reading the data behind its promises. A great deal of it did not hold up. Now I write fiction about what happens when nobody checks.
Physician, hospital executive, and recovering optimist about the business of American healthcare. My first novel, Rebecca's Treatment, is with my developmental editor.
Photograph by PhotosByLani
A Novel
Rebecca's
Treatment
Treatment
Carlotta Rinke
Placeholder cover — a real one gets designed when the book sells.
In developmental edit
Rebecca's Treatment
An accomplished biomedical engineer and elite athlete shatters her knee on a mountain bike. After several failed surgeries, the orthopedic surgeon who runs the biotech company where she works replaces the joint with an experimental therapy.
The results are extraordinary. Within weeks she is not merely recovered — she is stronger and faster than she was before the fall. Then she returns to competition under dubious circumstances, and learns that the surgeon has not told her the truth about what is in her knee.
Now she has to find an antidote before the treatment finishes what it started.
Why this book
I did not start out a skeptic.
I spent the last stretch of my medical career as a senior medical director at a national insurer, where part of my job was to check what health-technology companies claimed their products did against what the population data actually showed.
Often, the statements and the data the start-ups presented were half-baked, premature, and untested in larger populations. I became a skeptic.
That is the soil this novel grew in. It is not a book against science — I spent a career inside it, and I believe in it. It is a book about what happens to patients when the guardrails around research give way, and when the people holding the money are the ones deciding what counts as proof.
Also writing
Short fiction, and a second novel
Short stories
The Anatomy Lab · Making Amends · Church Wars
Three stories, several entered in competition, drawn from three decades of medicine and the people it puts in a room together.
In progress
The letters
A second novel built from my father's letters home from the Pacific and my mother's letters back from St. Louis, where she went to work in the defense plants and came out of the war with her own money.
Commentary
Off Label
Essays on healthcare, technology, and the stories we are sold. Published here, and occasionally in Desert Health News.
"You think about them for several hours, talk about them, and then they're forgotten." — my father, on the men he watched die in New Guinea
Stay in touch
News about the book.
When the book finds a home, you will hear from me. No schedule, nothing sold, nothing shared.
This form works on the finished site. Nothing happens in the preview.