What Your Blood Can't Tell You
The rise of wellness testing sells certainty—but are we buying anxiety instead?
Posted June 3, 2026 | Reviewed by Davia Sills
I’ve been looking for different ways to get a blood test done other than just having to go to my doctor. With age feeling like it’s advancing faster than a clock tick, I entered the world of direct-to-consumer blood testing and could feel my heart rate rising with every subscription page I landed on.
In most healthcare systems, the traditional method of being referred for a blood test still applies. You speak to a doctor or healthcare practitioner, discuss your symptoms, and they advise which test you need and refer you to the appropriate place to have this done. Results come back to the requesting doctor, and you have a follow-up or recovery notification of these and what, if any, further action was needed.
But as I looked at how many tests I could have done with a single blood test, not only did I hear the voice of Elizabeth Holmes in my head, I found myself in awe at just how many options were available to me, as long as I had my credit card with me, of course.
Having worked in general practice for over 20 years, I am used to reviewing results for patients I haven’t seen and adding comments on the significance of normal or abnormal findings. Most blood results are presented in a range, and of course, we all want our numbers to be right in the middle.
Depending on your local situation, having a blood test done and getting the results can be both physically and emotionally stressful . Even being told “everything is normal” when you feel something is definitely off can bring its own bag of mixed emotions. This might be the standard patient route to a blood test, but in 2026, we are not just potential patients but targetable consumers. The DTC blood testing market is growing at nearly 9 percent annually. With a valuation of around 20 billion in 2025, this is projected to exceed 53 billion in just 10 years.
In the U.S., consumers have a choice in what and how to test their blood. Function Health tests over 160 biomarkers twice a year for an annual fee. The offer is that more is more—five times more testing than a standard annual physical and covering well beyond the standard cholesterol, kidney, and liver tests your doctor might do routinely, including heavy metals, autoimmune panels, and ApoB. Inside Tracker looks at up to 48 biomarkers and also considers genetic data, and Everlywell offers at-home finger prick tests for food sensitivities, hormone levels, and STDs. There is also a simpler approach where other platforms, such as Personalabs, offer the chance to bypass a doctor referral and have specific tests done at a much cheaper price than a physician-organized test may cost within the complexities of U.S. healthcare.
Hot on the heels of the U.S. models, the UK also has regular biomarker tests as part of subscription plans with companies such as Thriva and Medichecks.
There are two main reasons people choose these routes versus traditional medicine:
Access: time, fees, and testing opportunities can be a problem that paying to test can solve. When I started working in a private GP in the UK, I was amazed at how many people would use this option to have blood tests done that their own GP would recommend. Work commitments and travel often meant that people just couldn’t get into their clinics before 9 and 6, so paying for these tests seemed like their only option.
Optimizing: younger, healthy consumers with disposable incomes are looking to test themselves to know their levels in an effort to then optimize and track their daily routine. Where healthspan was once associated with elderly care and optimizing patient care in the community, it is now a hot topic on social media and in wellness culture.
To test or not to test?
Early detection of some treatable conditions can be life-changing. Diagnosing anemia, thyroid disease, or early-stage diabetes can improve mortality as well as quality of life in a matter of days. Tracking a high fasting glucose or finding a low ferritin can give patients valuable insight into their health and prompt ways to improve these levels.
But what about everything else?
Unfortunately, it’s not looking as convincing as it sounds. A systematic review of 484 DTC products advertised online in Australia found that just 10.7 percent had genuine potential clinical utility. A further 30.7 percent were found to have only limited clinical utility, meaning they had very limited ability to provide actionable information to improve the consumer's health concerns. The majority were described as non-evidence-based commercial health checks, and nearly 18 percent targeted conditions not even recognized by mainstream medicine.
A Lancet editorial looked at this in more detail, concluding that the DTC blood testing market is an industry “built on fear ” with a pace of commercialization, including 10 new generic tests entering the market every day by 2033, that is unparalleled in current recognizable diagnostics. The editorial went on to specifically look at tests targeting multi-cancer early detection, which say they detect signals for over 50 cancer types in one blood test. Independent analyses of these tests showed that they detected stage 1-2 cancer with only 27 to 37 percent sensitivity, meaning the test was most likely to detect a cancer that has already advanced, often missing the early-stage cancer the consumer is being told will be detected.
The tests themselves?
Further BMJ analysis in December 2024 looked at the regulations around the specific tests and found there was no dedicated regulatory framework to govern the use of these products. Looking at the wellness-focused tests— hormones , nutritional markers, and food sensitivities—they concluded that these tests target healthy people who are most likely to suffer from the findings of a false positive. What can come next? Over-testing, distress about abnormal results that have no clear significance, and use of unvalidated non-prescribed products to correct the “abnormality” that may bring their own risks or side effects.
What you need to know
As of December 2024, The BMJ concluded that there are no randomized, controlled trials that exist to determine if these DTC tests lead to improved health outcomes. There will undoubtedly be more data as the market and use of these tests grow, but for now, there is no evidence to support the use of these generalized tests when it comes to health outcomes.
The test is abnormal: What next?
As a doctor, before ordering blood tests for a patient, I’d always ask myself the same things. What are you testing for, why is it worth doing now, and will the results change what you are going to do next?
If you are looking to pay for blood testing, I’d suggest the following things to consider before subscribing to your favorite social media doctors’ new blood testing business:
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Clara Doran, MBBS, MRCGP, is an experienced family medical health practitioner, TEDx speaker, and author, living with MS.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.