I want to be the only one to know if something's wrong.

May 19, 2009 2:55 PM

Can I get 1 blood test for 100s of possible problems, anonymously??

Because I am paranoid about my already unfairly tainted medical insurance records (sending my premiums to the moon and making my coverage horrible enough to warrant paying for this out of pocket), I would love to get an anonymous blood test (in Los Angeles or by mail) done and be tested for a zillion different things from thyroid to testosterone levels to diabetes, any blood disorders, etc.

Is this possible???

posted by citystalk to health & fitness (11 comments total)

Whether there's someone willing to do this or not, I would imagine they would need a whole lot of blood if you're really talking 100s of problems. What's more, I would expect it to cost you a bundle.
posted by dunkadunc at 3:03 PM on May 19

Yeah, you can do a regular blood panel with a blood draw, but to test for "zillions" of conditions under the sun will require a fair amount of blood, and it will most certainly not be cheap. (I had genetic testing last year for one specific condition; the test they did for me cost about $1500 and required three vials of blood.)
posted by scody at 3:29 PM on May 19

Thanks for the responses - as I said, I don't really care about cost or amount of blood needed. Specific places either online or in Los Angeles would be very helpful. Thanks!
posted by citystalk at 3:39 PM on May 19

I can't say one way or another if this is possible, but I would imagine they would make it as hard as possible to keep hypochondriacs and people suffering from Munchhausen syndrome from abusing it....
posted by gwenlister at 3:45 PM on May 19

Privatemdlabs seems to offer what you are looking for. Anylabtestnow also does this but they don't seem to have a location near you.
posted by get off of my cloud at 4:58 PM on May 19

You could always check the "volunteers" section of Craigslist for paid medical research studies at UCLA and Mt. Sinai. Blood panels are standard, and they'll often pay you for fairly rare and expensive tests and procedures.
posted by aquafortis at 6:26 PM on May 19

I would strongly - no, make that very strongly (in bold) - caution you against this approach. For two reasons. First, shotgun testing will undoubtedly be very expensive, and if you are young and otherwise healthy, the diagnostic yield will be extremely low. If you have specific symptoms, complaints, or concerns, you should consult a physician and determine what specific diagnostic tests should be employed to either diagnose or confirm your problem (if, that is, your problem can be diagnosed via blood test).

Second, and more importantly, is that all tests have a false positive and false negative rate. If you perform enough blood tests on yourself, you'll end up finding one or two that are slightly out of the "normal range". So then what ... well, you may be tempted to do confirmatory or follow-up tests. Fine, you might say, but what if that next test is a little more invasive or carries a little more risk (or a lot more cost). Well, that next test also has a chance if yielding a false positive. Long story short, you could end up borderline values or "false positives" to the point where you could actually cause yourself harm.

In your case, because you're "paranoid" about your medical records, you could actually end up with "false positive" test results in your medical record, which would cause what you are actually trying to avoid.

There's a reason why most diagnostic tests require the order of a physician (or other licensed health professional) - so that they are used properly and not in an blind, "shotgun" manner.
posted by scblackman at 6:54 PM on May 19 [2 favorites]

I can't agree enough with sc on this. You haven't thought this through if you are trying to protect the privacy of your health information. A positive test result, regardless of if you catch something real or it's a false positive, is in all likelihood ultimately going to lead to the involvement of a doctor, inclusion in a medical record, and possible access by an insurance company. If it's a false positive (as sc quite accurately noted the probability of false positives is going to be much higher when you blindly order lots of tests as you are planning), you will not only expose yourself to more tests and possible harm, but also could end up further impacting health coverage negatively and for no particularly good reason other than misguided curiosity.
posted by drpynchon at 7:34 PM on May 19

Many urgent care clinics ("doc-in-a-box") will do various blood tests for more common things (probably not 100's though). Call around and check prices -- even though you don't care about the price, you want to see if they name a price or start asking what sort of insurance you have. The ones that give you a straight answer to that question will be a lot more likely to not care who you are. The ones that ask if you have insurance will be more likely to communicate with insurance companies (and are likely to be more expensive). Ideally you will find a clinic that makes everyone pay at the time of service and refuses to take insurance.

Ask if you have to show ID -- they don't generally do things "anonymously", you will have to give a name. It just doesn't need to be your name, and you can refuse to give your SSN. Pay cash.

regardless of if you catch something real or it's a false positive, is in all likelihood ultimately going to lead to the involvement of a doctor, inclusion in a medical record, and possible access by an insurance company

So, pay cash for a second test at the urgent care clinic if something comes back positive. If there's a second positive, assume you need treatment. Choose to either see the doc that the insurance covers and have insurance pay, or pay out of pocket and stay anonymous. No reason to involve the insurance company if it's something cheap to treat that's curable.

Do be honest with the urgent care doctor about any medical conditions you have.

If you are willing to travel, you might be able to get all this done in Mexico.

Oh, and if your zillions of blood tests aren't reassuring you there are companies that specialize in giving people CAT scans for similar purposes.
posted by yohko at 10:19 PM on May 19

Thanks, everyone. I am not someone who's hoping I'm sick or who would abuse a system - I'm young and very healthy, actually, and I would just like to test for a few family history things like cholesterol, diabetes, etc. to simply see where my blood is on the scales without blipping up my private insurance creating more fake pre-existing causes that cause everyone to deny me normal insurance just because.

It was one of those freaking false positives that popped up in a routine checkup medical setting + trigger happy doctor who documents everything to the nth degree and embellishes his writeups that created the evil, irrelevant blip on my health insurance history that lead me to ask this question.

Side, related note: I really really hate insurance companies.
posted by citystalk at 12:56 AM on May 20

It was one of those freaking false positives that popped up in a routine checkup medical setting + trigger happy doctor who documents everything to the nth degree and embellishes his writeups that created the evil, irrelevant blip on my health insurance history that lead me to ask this question.

I know this is off track, but I want to stick up for us doctors for a moment: there are several reasons why we document things meticulously (in this case, presumably an abnormal lab value), One of the most important one is, of course, liability. If we don't document/address the "false positive" results that is listed on the lab results page - which, by the way, as soon as they are generated are part of your medical record - and that "false positive" turns out to be a clinically significant "true positive", then to a different reader of the medical record (such as a malpractice lawyer or jury), it can look like there was an abnormal lab value that the doctor simply ignored, to the patient's detriment. It is incumbent upon your doctor to make sense of the lab data as best as possible, with whatever information is known. If, in follow-up testing or in later visits, it turns out that an abnormal lab value was "not clinically significant", it's not hard to document that fact - you can ask your doctor to do so.
posted by scblackman at 5:54 AM on May 20 [1 favorite]