article. The doctors were Lauren Beardsley and Saman Rezaie from the
Scottsdale practice I’d visited.
The truth was that I hadn’t planned on using the patient case Drs.
Beardsley and Rezaie had told me about because it was a secondhand
account. The patient in question was being treated by another doctor
in their practice who had declined to speak to me. But, while their
signed statements in no way weakened my story, the likelihood that
they had caved to the company’s pressure worried me.
I noticed there was no signed statement from Adrienne Stewart, the
third doctor I had interviewed at that practice. That was a good thing
because I planned on using one or both of the patient cases she had
discussed with me. When I reached her by phone, she said that she
was visiting family in Indiana and hadn’t been present when Theranos
representatives came by the practice. I told her about her colleagues’
signed statements and warned her that the company would probably
try the same heavy-handed tactics with her when she returned.
Dr. Stewart emailed a few days later to let me know that Balwani
and two other men had indeed come by to speak to her as soon as
she’d gotten back to Arizona. The receptionist had told them she was
busy with patients, but they had refused to leave and had stayed in the
waiting room for hours until she finally came out to shake their hands.
They had made her agree to meet with them the following Friday
morning, which was in two days. I had a bad feeling about that
meeting, but there was nothing I could do about it. Dr. Stewart
promised she wouldn’t bow to any pressure. She felt it was important
to take a stand for her patients and the integrity of lab testing.
When Friday arrived, I tried to check in with Dr. Stewart several
times in the morning but couldn’t reach her. She called back in the
early evening, as I was driving out to eastern Long Island for the
weekend with my wife and three kids. She sounded rattled. She told
me Balwani had tried to make her sign a statement similar to the one
her colleagues had signed, but she had politely refused. Furious, he
had threatened to drag her reputation through the mud if she
appeared in any Journal article about Theranos. Her voice trembling,
she pleaded with me to no longer use her name. As I tried to reassure