Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
A belief held by many - and promoted by more than a handful of companies - is that more medical data about one's body is always better. However, this is not actually true. Much of the data we can collect about our health is useless. Some data can actually even make us less healthy by triggering costly and invasive diagnostic cascades for incidental findings of no clinical relevance, or by convincing us that we have diseases we don't.
In extreme brief, for an asymptomatic adult without known chronic medical problems, the majority of direct-to-consumer labs you see advertised on social media are not indicated. This includes full body scans, continuous glucose monitoring in non-diabetics, and extremely lengthy panels of blood tests. Your primary care physician/provider can help you identify which tests are appropriate, but unfortunately they also can make mistakes with this (by both advising tests that are not indicated, and failing to advise tests that are).
#clinicalreasoning #diagnostictesting #shorts
A belief held by many - and promoted by more than a handful of companies - is that more medical data about one's body is always better. However, this is not actually true. Much of the data we can collect about our health is useless. Some data can actually even make us less healthy by triggering costly and invasive diagnostic cascades for incidental findings of no clinical relevance, or by convincing us that we have diseases we don't.
In extreme brief, for an asymptomatic adult without known chronic medical problems, the majority of direct-to-consumer labs you see advertised on social media are not indicated. This includes full body scans, continuous glucose monitoring in non-diabetics, and extremely lengthy panels of blood tests. Your primary care physician/provider can help you identify which tests are appropriate, but unfortunately they also can make mistakes with this (by both advising tests that are not indicated, and failing to advise tests that are).
#clinicalreasoning #diagnostictesting #shorts
