Advancements in blood work analysis excites me, because I've been a glorified lab rat or chronic pain patient, with multiple things that need routine checking. (such as various thyroid levels, iron levels, crp, ana, ena etc.) I've had to learn what different lab results mean, through wikipedia, and other medical research websites. But at the end of the long medical jargon definitions and explanation of numbers I am almost always left asking what are my tests really telling me?
Its great that there have been ways like www.myehealth.ca to find out online what my new test results are, but there may be an easier way to understand what they mean. It's one thing to have it accessible but its even better to have it legible and understandable. It's like having a book thats been translated from Arabic to English. Go read this article about Blood Tests getting a makeover and becoming more readable to the average joe. I just read it, and it excites me because it could be a large medical advancement causing patients to understand results in a simple way.
There is an article here about making this a reality.
The man behind the ideas company is here.
~ElysiaB
Its great that there have been ways like www.myehealth.ca to find out online what my new test results are, but there may be an easier way to understand what they mean. It's one thing to have it accessible but its even better to have it legible and understandable. It's like having a book thats been translated from Arabic to English. Go read this article about Blood Tests getting a makeover and becoming more readable to the average joe. I just read it, and it excites me because it could be a large medical advancement causing patients to understand results in a simple way.
It means I can now make sense of the numbers in a way that I understand without having to spend hours reading up on a tiny test. Or trying to understand what the Dr said with his big words. At the end of which I would have wasted hours trying to interpret inconclusive results. All in all, its definitely worth checking it out for yourself, cause this is pretty awesome! When your done looking come back and let me know what are your thoughts are on it all? Below I've posted some of the pictures and feel free to use them and interpret your own tests, with the help of them. Also a handy tool to use in this discovery process is a converter to understand your levels in the right measurements. For example my levels of HDL were in mmol/l but with this handy converter I could type in my results and get it converted to mg/dl which is what these charts are in.
"The Basic Workup : The standard blood workup takes more than 30 measurements and can go on for more than four pages. All sorts of things can turn up in the report; the challenge for physician and patient alike is to find the signal within the noise."
"The Heart Disease Test
Alongside cholesterol tests and high-blood-pressure monitoring, the c-reactive protein, or CRP, test is widely used to spot people at risk for heart disease, the leading cause of death in the US."
"The Prostate Test
Short for prostate-specific antigen, the PSA test is one of the most common workups for men over 40—even though its reliability as a predictor of prostate cancer is controversial."
The man behind the ideas company is here.
~ElysiaB
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