This viral post has >8k likes and is a wonderful example of … grifting.

This person recommends asking your doctor for 26 different lab tests, and that if your doctor doesn’t oblige, “that tells you everything you need to know.”

That approach encourages confrontation, which I don’t agree with. Collaboration should be the goal. If you have a good doctor, I would encourage you to do your research and think about how a lab test will change your management of your own body. Ask for labs, but I would not recommend walking in with a list that a random person online says you need to do.

The other thing that bothered me about this post is that she claims that if you don’t understand your labs, she’ll interpret them for you for $47. The post preys upon people’s worries and anxieties.

Wanting to know more about the author, I read through her comments and then, there it was. The part she had probably meant to delete: Claude responded. Followed by a glitch sentence. She was copying and pasting AI to respond to her inquiries, some very legit queries as to how she could recommend blanket labs to people.

The point of me writing this is to say, be careful about what you see online. Influencers want to appear like doctors and that they have your back, but this makes it harder.