In this blog, InsideTracker's advisor, Erin Sharoni, explores the important questions to ask when blood testing. Erin blood tests frequently to take ownership of her health and wellness, and shares her experience of how she manages her own internal biochemistry.
When it comes to being proactive about our own health, most of us assume we have the Five W’s covered: Who, What, Where, When, Why. I’ve always found the Five W’s to be one of the most practical takeaways from grade school. Unlike, say, the trigonometry classes that came later and have proved to be, thus far, utterly inapplicable to my daily life.
In the context of monitoring health, whether using a tool like InsideTracker or simply scheduling an appointment to see a primary care physician, the Five W’s seem fairly obvious: The Who is you, the What is the test or the doctor, the Where is implicit, and without falling down an existential rabbit hole with Immanuel Kant, the Why is usually a result of symptomatic complaints or a desire for greater knowledge. When it comes to the When, things aren’t quite as clear.
Before everyone balks, Not clear? How on earth is it not clear? ‘When’ is when you make the appointment or schedule the test! let me explain.
When considering health-monitoring from an empowered perspective, the When is more than just the date and time at which something takes place. The When is a powerful element with regard to taking control of our own health, in making the shift from being the passenger to becoming the driver. In most cases, our quest for medical knowledge or health improvement is reactive in nature. We react to pain, to excess weight, to a lack of energy or to an illness. This reactive brand of healthcare is one of the main problems with the modern healthcare system, which is another discussion altogether.
As the calendar has just flipped to 2015, the New Year is a good example. New Year’s Day is a date that is full of as much potential and optimism as trepidation and stress. The date is a “When” punctuated by endless expectations in the form of resolutions we are rarely resolute about in truth, but because it is a moment defined by society as ripe with opportunity, most of us fill it with wishful action items. Not unlike waiting to schedule a blood test only after experiencing symptoms of illness, this is a reactive or at best, default action, rather than an empowered one.
The When becomes a really useful tool when we understand that we don’t need to wait for a certain date to pop up in the calendar, nor until a symptom is bad enough to prompt us to seek help. In the world of biomarkers and big data, “when” is a critical variable. Understanding when our bodies undergo some biochemical shift can help us to more accurately determine why and how.
The systems of the body do not operate in isolation from one another, nor do they operate independently of time. While some changes are sudden, many of them occur slowly, over a longer period. Some ebb and flow. The female hormonal cycle is a perfect example of this. It is an elegant, complex system and is still not fully understood, even by the most respected scientists in the field. Part of the difficulty lies in the constant change: the time at which a certain hormone is tested matters, and the peaks of various cycles may also shift with exposure to toxins, stress and disease, complicating the picture further. Cortisol testing is yet another example, as results differ based on the time of day at which the sample is taken. Vitamin D levels may be influenced by the seasons. It takes approximately 6-8 weeks to for blood tests to reflect concretely observable changes in Thyroid hormone levels after medication doses have been adjusted.
The point here is: “When” matters, because the picture is never static. By proactively screening our health at specific intervals, trends that we may not have otherwise seen are revealed. Ask any trainer, coach or nutritionist who works with elite athletes, and they’re likely to agree. For this reason, professional athletes often undergo more frequent testing than the average person. Performance improvements are hard to make when working blindly, and lifestyle improvements are no different. Testing any single biomarker in isolation is as unhelpful as testing infrequently, based only on an annual checkup.
The beauty of a tool like InsideTracker is that biomarker data can be collected and analyzed at the user’s own discretion. Benchmarks that shift over time are taken into account, and perhaps most importantly, both improvements and problems become that much clearer. A picture of what is changing over time, is only useful if we understand when. The changing of the calendar to 2015 is a helpful reminder to take stock of our health and wellbeing, but it’s just one moment in a collection of many.
