Doing your own blood tests?
leviathans 24 Nov 2011
I know we can get blood testing from companies too but it would be great to be able to do frequent specific tests ourselves to be able to adjust the dosage of a supplement/drug so that we achieve the best concentration of what we want.
I don't have any revenue right now, but I'd be curious to know if this would be doable in the future.
-Where could we find a reference book that explains how to do some blood tests?
-What material do we need? (a centrifuge I guess, but is there something else?
tornpie 27 Nov 2011
leviathans 27 Nov 2011
Thanks for supporting this thread! I'm sure that some hardcore members would be willing to (me included when I get the money). We just need to find a knowledgeable person to tell us how it works...This has been on my wish list for some time now. It's such a pain in the ass working with doctors. Unfortunately, my finances currently prohibit me from in investing in the equipment. I did some precursory searching and refurbished blood and urine analysis setups were within reason. For personal testing, one can go old school and not have to have an automated behemoth that labs and hospitals use to test hundreds or thousands of samples. It would be nice to have someone more knowledgeable or perhaps have done it post a DIY article on this. If we could get the harder core members on here to diligently test themselves and post their findings, we could probably have some neat insights into what's working, how it's working, and who knows what else. Besides infrequent blood tests from doctors, the only other concrete way to get a little more rigorous that I can think of off hand is 23andme. I hope to see this thread develop into something neat.
Here's some stuff to try to convince other members about the usefulness of this :
Having our blood testing material would be also really useful for experimenting with supplements/drugs that affect hormones. Often people say to not mess with hormones because it is highly unpredictable and you have to wait for too long to get blood tests done. But if one could do it's own hormone blood test every 1,2 or 3 days, we could asses exactly how the supplement/drug is affecting the hormones. I know that someone here used DHEA and ended with too much estrogen. If he had been able to monitor is hormones, he would have stopped much earlier. We could even try to micromanage things to see what happens.
Also, we could finally know how much IU is needed to get a good vitamin D levels.
Even better, as a future Statistician, I could build statistical models for predicting the change in a variable (measurable by blood testing) from the intake of some supplement/drug. This could leads us to find good dosage that would work for most people.
leviathans 27 Nov 2011
There are multiple types of analyzers : Chemistry, Electrolyte, Hematology, Immunoassay and urinalysis analyzers. The prices are highly variable.
I think the most useful one is the immunoassay analyzer. The trouble is finding one which can test for the most interesting things and that is not extremely costly.
There seems to be some analyzers at reasonable (that's subjective) prices : http://www.labx.com/...d.cfm?catid=416
From this site we see the Abbot AxSYM sold for 10k and here the menu : http://international...s.cfm?sys_id=71
Sadly Vitamin D is only in the more costly Abbot ARCHITECT : http://international....cfm?sys_id=164
One old version called Abbot IMx is also sold at 4k and it can do some tests.
Isn't it cool that we could do our own cancer analysis ? Testing for cancer and cardiac functions every month at home seems to me as a much better solution than taking some longevity supplement.
I have to stop searching for these things since I have to study. If anybody find anything interesting, post it here. There must exists some small-scale less costly analyzers.