Everyone wants normal test results. Regardless of the test, and the biomarkers tested, everyone wants test results that reflect how healthy they are, and that validate that what they’re doing, or what they’re not doing, is working. It’s quite normal to want normal test results.
But if you develop chronic symptoms, you should want the opposite, in that you should want abnormal test results. You should want test results that indicate why you developed fatigue, joint pain, IBS, anxiety, depression, insomnia, or headaches. You should want test results that show that you have a parasitic infection, mercury toxicity, vitamin D deficiency, or steroid hormone imbalance. Because if you know the causes of your symptoms, then you can take steps to address the causes and recover your health.
Most people who develop chronic symptoms, however, don’t change their perspective on test results. They continue to want normal test results, despite the importance of abnormal test results to their recovery, because conventional medicine has conditioned the belief that abnormal test results are always bad, and that you can’t do anything about them. That your only hope, if you receive abnormal test results that warrant treatment, is to take medication to suppress your symptoms, typically for the rest of your life.
It’s a completely disempowering belief—based on the dogma that chronic illness is irreversible—that ultimately causes people to avoid going to practitioners, to ask for tests, because the most certain way to not receive abnormal test results is to not do any tests.
Why most people prefer not knowing over knowing
Most people don’t want to know about the intestinal parasite that they contracted on their last vacation, or that mercury has been slowly leaching into their body from their amalgam fillings, or that they have a chronic vitamin D deficiency, because they don’t spend enough time in the sun, or that their hormones are out of balance, because they use toxic skincare products.
The result, of course, is that most people tend to avoid going to practitioners when they probably should, and if they do, they don’t ask their practitioners to order tests for a comprehensive evaluation of their health. They tend to accept whatever tests their practitioners suggest, most of which are superficial, conventional tests that don’t investigate the causes of symptoms, but rather evaluate whether someone meets the criteria for a disease diagnosis.
This phenomenon—the avoidance of potentially negative but helpful information—is referred to in psychology as “information avoidance,” and can be observed in innumerable facets of humanity. In finance, for example, investors are less likely to check their portfolio when the stock market is down than when the stock market is up. And, in medicine, patients will avoid going to practitioners for evaluation and to have tests conducted if they anticipate abnormal results.1
In the context of chronic illness, information avoidance is what prevents people from seeking information about why their symptoms developed, and, by extension, it’s what prevents people from implementing a data-driven strategy to recover their health.
If, say, you develop IBS, you might rationalize not going to a practitioner, to ask for help, and instead experiment with a certain diet and certain supplements that you’ve heard were helpful for other people with IBS. You might try to figure everything out on your own. It’s not a bad idea to experiment with diet and supplements, but without test results that indicate why your symptoms developed, you’re basically flying without an instrument panel, relying on intuition over objective data.
If Blastocystis hominis, a parasite, is causing your IBS, and you haven’t tested for, and therefore don’t know about, the parasite, then doing a juice cleanse and taking turmeric and slippery elm and marshmallow root probably isn’t going to help much. You have to go after the parasite. And the only way that you’ll know about the parasite is if you test for it.
How to overcome information avoidance
Overcoming information avoidance, and getting comfortable with the discomfort of learning about the factors that are compromising your health, is thus a precondition to resolving your symptoms. But information avoidance is a powerful force, and overcoming it isn’t easy. It’s not easy to recognize the influence it exerts on your life. It’s not easy to will yourself to push through it, to seek information about your health that could be concerning, and that you’re otherwise unaware of. Living with chronic symptoms is difficult enough, let alone having to also deal with the constant worrying that abnormal test results could cause.
No one wants to learn that they have an intestinal parasite. No one. And if you don’t do a stool test, then you won’t have to know. You can just continue trying certain diets and supplements that might help.
But it’s important to recognize that, on your journey to better health, intuition can only take you so far. You have to rely on data, on abnormal test results, to get to your ultimate destination of symptom resolution. You have to get comfortable with the discomfort of collecting saliva, blood, urine, and stool samples, to test for parasites, bacteria, fungi, viruses, metals, chemicals, food sensitivities, hormones, organic acids, and micronutrients.
It might seem overwhelming to run so many tests—to conduct such a comprehensive evaluation of your health—and it certainly would be, if you were to run all of these tests at once. I think a better approach is to start with one test.
That’s not to say that I recommend starting with any test, just for the sake of running a test. I recommend starting with a specialty test, specifically, given that abnormal results from specialty tests can often be translated into actionable steps you can take to improve your health, while abnormal results from conventional tests are less actionable. I think it’s profoundly motivating to receive abnormal test results that you can actually do something about.
Perhaps you start with a quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) stool analysis, to test for parasites, bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Or an organic acids test, to evaluate your exposure to toxic chemicals, accumulation of oxalate, vitamin and mineral levels, and oxidative stress. Or a mycotoxins test, to evaluate your exposure to mold. If some of your test results are abnormal, you might find that you’re motivated to run another test, so that you can continue to identify opportunities for resolving your symptoms that you wouldn’t have known about otherwise.
The point isn’t to deliberate endlessly over which one test is the best test for you, because neither you nor anyone can know what the best test is for you until you start the process of collecting data and making sense of the complexity of your physiology. The point is to start with one test, and to move forward incrementally from there.
Eventually, your abnormal test results will add up, the full picture will emerge, and you’ll arrive at an understanding of why your symptoms developed, and, more importantly, what you can do to resolve them.
Just as an epic journey to some far-off destination starts with one step, your journey to better health, and a better life, starts with one test.
If you’re interested in further exploring how abnormal test results could catalyze your recovery, you can schedule a call to learn more about Quantify membership and how we can help you to get the data you need to resolve your symptoms and optimize your health.