How many vials of blood are necessary to run tests?
This question was crossing my mind as I saw Christian prepping 10+ vials for the blood he was about to draw to run my lab tests. In my (admittedly limited) experience of getting blood drawn at an annual physical (or that one time I spent the night in the ER…) it seemed like 2-3 vials were all that was ever necessary to “get answers.”
Which had me wondering about why we were now drawing 5-10 times as much blood as I’d ever had taken in the past.
In talking with DTE’s helpful staff, I started to piece together an analogy for myself of why they run so many more tests than most people are used to getting when doing lab work.
I grew up around cars that were seemingly endlessly getting worked on, repaired, or maintained. It turns out there are great analogies that can be made between the car ↔ mechanic and patient ↔ doctor relationship.
Good preventative maintenance on a car requires getting the oil changed and tires rotated at certain intervals. This is basically the equivalent of the blood tests I’d had before: annual physicals where they were looking for the most common high-impact issues without driving prices up by testing for “everything” without a “good” reason.
Other than regular maintenance, I’d guess most cars on the road today don’t get a second thought from their owners. Why pay more money for tests if it’s reliably driving you to work and back?
But three categories of cars justify getting a “deeper look” under the hood (or for us humans to get the bigger blood tests).
If your car’s running rough, when you take it into the shop the mechanic will probably start by asking you when it happens and what it feels like. From there they’ll probably have a pretty good idea of what it is, and to confirm their theory they’ll hook it up to a scanner.
In my analogy of medicine, this is if you’re not feeling normal but a regular physical hasn’t “fixed” you and now you seek a place like DTE that’s running a much wider blood test based on what they learned from your consultation.
A perfect example of this is if you look at Formula 1 racing. It feels like they have more people looking at computer screens charting data from the cars than actual people working on the cars.
The human body is an amazing “machine.” If you want to optimize how much performance you can get out of it (and how you recover) you’ll care more about more than just the “highest impact” tests that you get at a physical, because even a 1% improvement goes a long way in sports.
As cars age, parts wear out, things build up, and specialty products can go a long way toward taking care of those issues. For example, you can send your used engine oil to specialty labs that will tell you the health of some of your engine internals and the additives/products that will give your engine a longer life without a major rebuild.
Proactively knowing what would make a difference for you as you get older makes a huge difference to how you age. This also starts with looking at a wider range of factual information about your body, or more than the “standard” labs.
The more I thought about this it actually totally makes sense why DTE was running so many tests. I fall somewhere between “not running normally” and “squeezing more performance” because I want to both get back to normal but also as I point out in my first blog post. I want to be able to get back to being the guy that’s down for a last minute thing without being worried if I have the energy or my body can do it.
I’m excited to see what the results of my tests show. Because that’s where the real magic happens, combining the deep experience of someone like Sarah with lots of information to prove/disprove her hypothesis of what could help me be the best version of my body.
Stick around for that blog post - it’ll be a good one!
-Lyndon