About a decade ago, 48-year-old Darren Sidaway started having health concerns he didn’t think he could bring to his doctor.
Sidaway, who lives in Cleveland, had long struggled with weight, and worried that he had metabolic issues that put him at risk for Alzheimer’s or early death. But his routine blood work seemed normal so he did not think his doctor would order more tests, and without that his insurance was unlikely to pay for it. So he ordered about $200 worth of tests — dozens of them — through Goodlabs, a tech company selling lab tests directly to consumers without requiring a doctor’s order.
The tests looked at biomarkers his doctor wasn’t monitoring, like uric acid levels, which some studies link to insulin resistance, and signs of immune system inflammation. The results showed that for him, some of those markers were elevated compared to a general population. Having read studies linking some of those markers to Alzheimer’s risk, Sidaway started looking for ways to lower them.
“This is the stuff that if I went to my doctor [with], my doctor would kind of look at me like I’m weird,” he said of the tests. Later, he ordered his own cortisol test because he suspected stress was driving the fluid buildup in his eye. Sidaway said the specialist he consulted was “mildly annoyed” because he felt the test wasn’t clinically useful and also wasn’t recommended for his condition.
But Sidaway didn’t want to wait “20 years for the long-term studies and double-blind, placebo-controlled studies for them to say X, Y, and Z works,” he said. “Doctors are going to have to get used to this and navigate this.”
Sidaway is among a fast-growing subset of Americans ordering their own lab and genetic screening panels online for hundreds of dollars a pop — even if they conflict with medical screening standards or insurance guidelines — desperate for immediate insights into their health. Customers typically order and pay for the tests directly online without speaking to a doctor, and samples are gathered and processed at partner lab companies like Quest Diagnostics, collected at home by a phlebotomist, or, in some cases, collected and shipped by customers themselves.
