I had to laugh when I read this. American doctors go mostly, or solely, on that 'bloodwork'. In all the 40 years I lived in Belgium blood testing was done twice before a surgery (and it had probably little to do with these test tube measures). But here, you go for a broken nail, you need blood work! And I hate syringes and almost faint seeing blood, so you can imagine how I work very hard at home so as not to have to go to a doctor!
As proof of your discourse I mention here how both I myself and a friend, avid out-doors people, both tested as vitD deficient. I bought a bottle and read the ingredients, took a few and decided to throw the chemical in the garbage. Later on I read some articles on how vitD is made and what it really is, and regretted even trying a couple.
Now I mostly go for capsuled herbs or tinctures or low dose homeopathic tablets (from which I know where they dirived from) made by a trusted herbalist. Both help not only me but also for my animals.
This is a great piece. This observation in your opening paragraph is of utmost importance: "... [the] reification itself generates health-damaging anxiety."
We’ve all been there: you’re sitting in the exam chair for a routine check-up, and instead of looking at you, your doctor is glued to a computer screen. They start rattling off a checklist of tests you supposedly need, completely ignoring the fact that you feel great and don’t want them.
This aggressive screening pipeline is a form of medical terrorism that leads to bogus diagnosis which result in a cascade of unnecessary pharmaceutical treatments and ongoing medical dependency.
Patients who place blind trust in the medical establishment or feel insecure about their well-being become easy targets for defensive screening protocols and aggressive over-treatment. This predatory system is particularly damaging to the elderly, who are often the most vulnerable to over-medication and systemic pressure.
At the end of the day, the doctor’s prescribed role has shifted to filling out a computer checklist; patient welfare comes last as they channel individuals onto a conveyor belt of completely unnecessary prescriptions.
Thank you for this very clear and informative article! And also a huge thanks for making your books available on Lulu. Just bought the one on iodine and plan to buy more as well. I would rather have books in my hands than a computer library, so I really appreciate your writings available in book form.
This is a really interesting piece, and I agree with its premise. But I am completely unconvinced of the conclusion based on my own experience with blood tests. I've had a high CRP reading that lined up exactly with a bad gastritis flare—my doctor could literally see I was inflamed. Once it settled down, my CRP went back to normal. Same thing with my liver numbers after being on painkillers that are known to hammer the liver. My hunch is that a test can be an imperfect reference point that can still be largely useful for comparison. CRP isn't an "entity" you can pour into a beaker, but it does track something real that we can see with our own eyes. The number itself has its own inflated story, I'm sure—but some stories track the territory (terrain) pretty well when various environmental factors are affecting our health. I think the bigger mistake is worshipping the number as a prescreening too rather than using it as a diagnostic indicator when you're looking for clues of a health issue. Anyway, that's what I get out of this.
I don't think it means to say blood work is a bunch of random numbers, but the relation to factory invented stuff seems very important and may create a much weaker correlation to reality than we are hoping for. I wish they knew how much it could be off.
The way it's written it feels like a newborn would register nothing for B12? (as it's measuring for the invented chemical?) Unless it has some inside of it because its mum took B12 or had it come in through "fortified" food?
Another factor is how different we can be. Roger Williams wrote "Biochemical Individuality: The Basis for the Genetotrophic Concept" on that. The differences can be massive between what people need.
Laboratory tests, i.e. numbers, have virtually replaced clinical evaluation and reasoning. Doctors treat numbers that are called “risk factors.” Most don’t understand how the numbers are measured. This paper makes that clear.
Here’s a paper I was never able to publish that challenged various numbers used to follow dialysis patients. I would greatly appreciate your take.
Wow, this data is absolutely brilliant…You’ve beautifully mapped out what is fundamentally a massive plumbing and fluid dynamics issue in these patients . I’ve written a lot about fluid dynamics and relation to cancer recently.
A lot of conventional doctors look at these numbers and immediately jump to prescribing more meds —assuming that low hemoglobin and high EPO doses just mean the bone marrow isn't signaling right, or that low albumin is just a sign of poor nutrition.But your data exposes the real mechanical problem: it’s a "leaky garden hose" issue. Serum albumin is like the body's natural fluid sponge. It keeps the pressure high enough to pull water out of the tissues and lock it inside the blood vessels. When albumin drops, that sponge effect fails, and fluid leaks out of the blood vessels and pools in the tissues. Because a dialysis machine can only vacuum out fluid that is actually inside the blood vessels, all that tissue fluid stays trapped, which is why the post-weight numbers (PW-TW) shoot way up.The most fascinating part of your data is how perfectly lower hemoglobin tracks with that trapped fluid. It’s the ultimate proof of hemodilution.
The low hemoglobin isn't necessarily because the body isn't making red blood cells; it's because those cells are quite literally drowning in a backed-up swamp of extra water. It dilutes the blood concentration on paper .
The body senses that the tissues are starving for oxygen, so it pumps out massive doses of EPO to make more cells—but because the machine's fluid clearance metrics (URR and kt/V) are struggling, the extra water just keeps diluting the new cells.
I am starting to believe that everything the medical industrial complex does is a magic trick to fool us into buying their products and services that are doing nothing more than leading us to deaths door !!!
And so it is. My brother has identical labs to mine, yet he is taking an arms length list of "meds" and I don't take any. He is clearly not as healthy as I am. But, he believes that his "doctor" is doing him favor. He is overweight and satisfied that he is in complete command of his health. He has always been suggestible, and I have not. The doctor makes a fortune "treating" him and others like him, and makes nothing from me. My doctor retired recently, and now I don't have a doctor. My brother told me, (jokingly) ... "If you want to have a doctor, you have to take some meds". More circular logic. How long, Lord?
so sad your brother doesn't see the writing on the wall and wonder why you're healthier than he while he does as the doc orders taking all his scripts and in the end is worse off than you...no clue his ship is sinking before his blind eyes..I'm sad you have to watch him...
Thanks so much for a very informative article. It looks like bloodwork is a waste of time and money...I have no desire to venture into a medical office. I've studied health and nutrition 65 years. I found out in 1980 that one needs to do one's own nutrition research, because the food Industry supports nutrition schools. There are no schools, where doctors could study nutrition., if they wanted to study it. 95% of health problems stem from what enters the bloodstream via ingestion or injection. When I have had a problem, I check what I did to create it. It usually has been the wrong food.
Recommendation: run the same three categories against a manufacturer package insert, not only the bench recipe. The insert is the company speaking. It usually describes category one in operational language and then disclaims two and three in the limitations. That is Grant’s parse in the vendor’s own type.
Questions: (1) When the “gold standard” for a new test is another lab behavior — antigen scored against PCR, PCR scored against a prior PCR — is that category two citing category one, or has the circle already closed? (2) Band-counting (HIV Western blot, Lyme MMWR) looks like category three written as a committee rule: a vote on bands, not an entity in the blood. Have you or Grant put that next to the B12/TSH cases?
Thanks! Been craving some revelations on lab and blood work (scams) as it seemed no one reveals anything about it. Well, I *did* occasionally take note of problems with some individual tests and things in general.
Some other articles I had...
Dr Garrett Smith | The Limitations of Blood Tests (2017)
I had to laugh when I read this. American doctors go mostly, or solely, on that 'bloodwork'. In all the 40 years I lived in Belgium blood testing was done twice before a surgery (and it had probably little to do with these test tube measures). But here, you go for a broken nail, you need blood work! And I hate syringes and almost faint seeing blood, so you can imagine how I work very hard at home so as not to have to go to a doctor!
As proof of your discourse I mention here how both I myself and a friend, avid out-doors people, both tested as vitD deficient. I bought a bottle and read the ingredients, took a few and decided to throw the chemical in the garbage. Later on I read some articles on how vitD is made and what it really is, and regretted even trying a couple.
Now I mostly go for capsuled herbs or tinctures or low dose homeopathic tablets (from which I know where they dirived from) made by a trusted herbalist. Both help not only me but also for my animals.
At the height of the D craze I tried a fluid one and took one drop, immediately decided "NOPE!" and did just like you :D
This is a jaw-dropping report.
Your writing is always so clear!
Thank you.
This is a great piece. This observation in your opening paragraph is of utmost importance: "... [the] reification itself generates health-damaging anxiety."
We’ve all been there: you’re sitting in the exam chair for a routine check-up, and instead of looking at you, your doctor is glued to a computer screen. They start rattling off a checklist of tests you supposedly need, completely ignoring the fact that you feel great and don’t want them.
This aggressive screening pipeline is a form of medical terrorism that leads to bogus diagnosis which result in a cascade of unnecessary pharmaceutical treatments and ongoing medical dependency.
Patients who place blind trust in the medical establishment or feel insecure about their well-being become easy targets for defensive screening protocols and aggressive over-treatment. This predatory system is particularly damaging to the elderly, who are often the most vulnerable to over-medication and systemic pressure.
At the end of the day, the doctor’s prescribed role has shifted to filling out a computer checklist; patient welfare comes last as they channel individuals onto a conveyor belt of completely unnecessary prescriptions.
Like a roulette wheel, It's a numbers game!
Thank you for this very clear and informative article! And also a huge thanks for making your books available on Lulu. Just bought the one on iodine and plan to buy more as well. I would rather have books in my hands than a computer library, so I really appreciate your writings available in book form.
This is a really interesting piece, and I agree with its premise. But I am completely unconvinced of the conclusion based on my own experience with blood tests. I've had a high CRP reading that lined up exactly with a bad gastritis flare—my doctor could literally see I was inflamed. Once it settled down, my CRP went back to normal. Same thing with my liver numbers after being on painkillers that are known to hammer the liver. My hunch is that a test can be an imperfect reference point that can still be largely useful for comparison. CRP isn't an "entity" you can pour into a beaker, but it does track something real that we can see with our own eyes. The number itself has its own inflated story, I'm sure—but some stories track the territory (terrain) pretty well when various environmental factors are affecting our health. I think the bigger mistake is worshipping the number as a prescreening too rather than using it as a diagnostic indicator when you're looking for clues of a health issue. Anyway, that's what I get out of this.
I don't think it means to say blood work is a bunch of random numbers, but the relation to factory invented stuff seems very important and may create a much weaker correlation to reality than we are hoping for. I wish they knew how much it could be off.
The way it's written it feels like a newborn would register nothing for B12? (as it's measuring for the invented chemical?) Unless it has some inside of it because its mum took B12 or had it come in through "fortified" food?
Another factor is how different we can be. Roger Williams wrote "Biochemical Individuality: The Basis for the Genetotrophic Concept" on that. The differences can be massive between what people need.
Laboratory tests, i.e. numbers, have virtually replaced clinical evaluation and reasoning. Doctors treat numbers that are called “risk factors.” Most don’t understand how the numbers are measured. This paper makes that clear.
Here’s a paper I was never able to publish that challenged various numbers used to follow dialysis patients. I would greatly appreciate your take.
https://substack.com/@richardamerlingmd437332/note/p-216014652?r=n1psz&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Wow, this data is absolutely brilliant…You’ve beautifully mapped out what is fundamentally a massive plumbing and fluid dynamics issue in these patients . I’ve written a lot about fluid dynamics and relation to cancer recently.
A lot of conventional doctors look at these numbers and immediately jump to prescribing more meds —assuming that low hemoglobin and high EPO doses just mean the bone marrow isn't signaling right, or that low albumin is just a sign of poor nutrition.But your data exposes the real mechanical problem: it’s a "leaky garden hose" issue. Serum albumin is like the body's natural fluid sponge. It keeps the pressure high enough to pull water out of the tissues and lock it inside the blood vessels. When albumin drops, that sponge effect fails, and fluid leaks out of the blood vessels and pools in the tissues. Because a dialysis machine can only vacuum out fluid that is actually inside the blood vessels, all that tissue fluid stays trapped, which is why the post-weight numbers (PW-TW) shoot way up.The most fascinating part of your data is how perfectly lower hemoglobin tracks with that trapped fluid. It’s the ultimate proof of hemodilution.
The low hemoglobin isn't necessarily because the body isn't making red blood cells; it's because those cells are quite literally drowning in a backed-up swamp of extra water. It dilutes the blood concentration on paper .
The body senses that the tissues are starving for oxygen, so it pumps out massive doses of EPO to make more cells—but because the machine's fluid clearance metrics (URR and kt/V) are struggling, the extra water just keeps diluting the new cells.
I am starting to believe that everything the medical industrial complex does is a magic trick to fool us into buying their products and services that are doing nothing more than leading us to deaths door !!!
Keep the good work up!
And so it is. My brother has identical labs to mine, yet he is taking an arms length list of "meds" and I don't take any. He is clearly not as healthy as I am. But, he believes that his "doctor" is doing him favor. He is overweight and satisfied that he is in complete command of his health. He has always been suggestible, and I have not. The doctor makes a fortune "treating" him and others like him, and makes nothing from me. My doctor retired recently, and now I don't have a doctor. My brother told me, (jokingly) ... "If you want to have a doctor, you have to take some meds". More circular logic. How long, Lord?
so sad your brother doesn't see the writing on the wall and wonder why you're healthier than he while he does as the doc orders taking all his scripts and in the end is worse off than you...no clue his ship is sinking before his blind eyes..I'm sad you have to watch him...
Thanks so much for a very informative article. It looks like bloodwork is a waste of time and money...I have no desire to venture into a medical office. I've studied health and nutrition 65 years. I found out in 1980 that one needs to do one's own nutrition research, because the food Industry supports nutrition schools. There are no schools, where doctors could study nutrition., if they wanted to study it. 95% of health problems stem from what enters the bloodstream via ingestion or injection. When I have had a problem, I check what I did to create it. It usually has been the wrong food.
Nicely done.
One recommendation, and two questions.
Recommendation: run the same three categories against a manufacturer package insert, not only the bench recipe. The insert is the company speaking. It usually describes category one in operational language and then disclaims two and three in the limitations. That is Grant’s parse in the vendor’s own type.
Questions: (1) When the “gold standard” for a new test is another lab behavior — antigen scored against PCR, PCR scored against a prior PCR — is that category two citing category one, or has the circle already closed? (2) Band-counting (HIV Western blot, Lyme MMWR) looks like category three written as a committee rule: a vote on bands, not an entity in the blood. Have you or Grant put that next to the B12/TSH cases?
Thanks! Been craving some revelations on lab and blood work (scams) as it seemed no one reveals anything about it. Well, I *did* occasionally take note of problems with some individual tests and things in general.
Some other articles I had...
Dr Garrett Smith | The Limitations of Blood Tests (2017)
https://web.archive.org/web/20180620031446/http://nutritionrestored.com/the-limitations-of-blood-tests
Lab Value Larceny (2024) | They want your blood so they can cast their spells of death, sickness and disease
https://medicinegirl.substack.com/p/lab-value-larceny
Brilliant, thank you 🙏
Thank you so much for putting some of these processes in readable print! I already knew this whole story stunk but now I can articulate it better.
Does the same methodology apply to the variety of cholesterol levels they “find” in my blood?