Ok, so I went to the lab site and found that it meets CLIA lab. requirements. So it satisfies certification requirements just as a hospital or other facility would have to be considered suitable for medical testing. Next the question becomes, do the tests that they off contribute to some legitimate aspect of health care. They site a 2002 JAMA study that links nutritional deficiencies to certain deseases. Unfortunately, the study in question is not posted. They compared their assays to Ha1g (sp?) for long term blood sugar assessment. Impressive.
Empirically, the next step, beyond looking at that 2002 study, would be to research each of nutritional deficiencies and look at the literature supporting each of the deseases sited.
Now, if I suspected that I had one these deseases, I'd be looking for answers. "Entrez Pubmed" is a good friend of mine.
Yes! and they have a tutorial for people who don't know how to read medical studies
. Thanks to the late Senator Pepper, who proposed this site as soon as the internet was invented. Surely anyone with common sense knows that many diseases are caused by nutritional deficiencies and has known that long before 2002. Didn't we all learn about rickets in school?
What many people don't know is that nutrition is not just a matter of eating their vegetables. there are many ( hundreds) of genes that block different nutrients, so we may have a family disposition to malnutrition, as I do, no matter how well we eat. And, large farms no longer rotate crops, which means that soil lacks the nutrients it once had. They add some vitamins and minerals, but not all that the soil would naturally have. This means that trace minerals like lithium and molybdenum never get into our food. One wonders, for example, how many people who take lithium as a prescription would never have needed it, had they gotten those trace minerals they'd naturally have gotten during their lives.
The bottom line is we are very fortunate to have this new type of test available now, so that those of us who are concerned about our health can make sure we're getting, and absorbing, what we need.
For those who feel a need to have everything to do with medicine studied and approved, did you know aspirin has never been understood, but got approved anyway, because it has been around so long? Or, that the very best topical antibiotic is sugardine ( a concoction of white table sugar and betadine of all things) but it has never been approved, simply because it can be bought in any grocery store? I used sugardne on a rooster with bumblefoot that had gotten into it's bones (considered the death nell ) after seeing a study on it being used on laminitis. In three days, a 3/4" deep infection was healed with the healthiest skin. My patient lived, and I'm not even a vet ( took him to a vet who said he'd be dead in 24 hours and refused to treat him). I've since met the director of a wound care center that illegally used sugardine on his most critical patients because he knew it was their best chance.
There are far too many politics in medicine and some of them have made us skeptical of the wrong things and trusting of the wrong things. We all need to be our own researchers, and it's great to have this tool (the ncbi site)
