#wellnessfx

I’m so happy you asked!! As a matter of fact, I had my blood drawn five months ago in April. I used www.wellnessfx.com which I highly recommend.

I had already dropped 124 lbs at that point, but my results indicated that there was still room for improvement, though I am 100% certain that if I had tested before my weight loss each category would have been in red. WellnessFX color codes the results to make them easier to understand.

Most of my markers were in green like my HDL “good cholesterol” was at 67 ((Total HDL ratio 2.8)) and my Triglycerides (38) while my CRP was in the “moderate” category at 2.07 (>3 is high risk) and my Apo B (the “bad” protein in LDL) was at 88 (>80 is high risk) but as I mentioned, that was 5 months ago. Hopefully those numbers will improve when I re-test in the near future.

My blood sugar was at 71 and my A1c level was 4.9 which is awesome.

I really wish I had tested before my weight loss while I was at my least healthy state. I wasn’t concerned with my health at that time, unfortunately.

Either way I think those numbers are pretty damn good considering that I follow a diet dominated by butter, eggs and bacon!

Access cutting-edge diagnostic testing, the latest nutritional science, and medical practitioners committed to preventative health.

Image via WellnessFX

Admit it. You’ve done some WebMD self-diagnosing more than once. What if I told you there’s a way to actually get some serious medical advice on the Internet? You’ll just need to send over a little bit of blood.

  WellnessFX is an online dashboard that visualizes your blood test results over time and calculates your health based on the changes. Apparently your blood regenerates every four months so the good and bad differences in your diet and lifestyle can become more apparent over time. If you’re worried about your blood sugar, thyroid, or cholesterol levels, this dashboard could be a step in the right direction.

WellnessFX Experience/Experiment Continued from Part 1

Now this is more like it! By "it" I am referring to the selection of practitioners and the wealth of info provided for each one of them. Most of the WellnessFX practitioners are women, which fits me perfectly. Dudes are great, but I prefer a woman doctor, nutritionist and well, a woman most things. I wasn't that kid with pro football players posters on my wall as a kid. I had the Heather Locklear posters, a-plenty.

For me the filter/search box in the practitioner section is perfect. I am personally mostly interested in Paleo-friendly practitioners and the option to pick from medical doctors, nutritionist or both is pretty cool. In my previous post I was critical of having only two options to pick my practitioner from and while I am still sticking to my guns on that, it would appear that the stable of awesome practitioners I was wishing for, is in fact at my fingertips.

Picking a Guru

Picking a guru is not as easy as it sounds. I now have a huge stable of gurus to choose from and seeing how none of them are known names to me, I really have to do my homework to find someone who fits my needs.

Feature Request: @WellnessFX does in fact read these users blogs/articles and they were very cool to me on the previous article. So, I'll add another feature request here. I'd love to see Twitter handles and links to blogs and websites for each practitioner. Anything that can help me stalk these people properly and be totally comfortable with them, the better.

It's about to get silly, if you're a skimmer fast-forward past the bullet-points

Here is a little unfiltered access to the inside-voice in my head as I roll through these practitioners:

I dig the doctors that list brain, mental health and stress reduction

I love that many of the woman doctors list "women's heath" but they never really mention guys heath

I had to Google "Bariatric Nutrition" that is actually a big plus. She knows some stuff I've never even heard of, but I've avoid major surgeries to this point.

Good old Ben Greenfield, cool dude but just a bit "sleazy car salesman for me"

If there is a link to a website, it better look damn professional. This is my health we are talking about here

Seeing Paleo and Vegetarian listed in "specialties" doesn't make me think a practitioner is passionate about diet. I mean a mechanic will fix any car, because they get paid to. But I want a practitioner who lives they diet there going to talk to me about. You either eat meat or you don't.

I dig girls in wet-suits. Not sure how it applies to wellness, well, maybe I get it…

I hate to admit it, but the old dude doesn't sell me (I know I am swimming in the shallow-end here) … wait… this guy has a great bio, but he really needs to update his picture to something other than that silly suit. He has videos on his site as well that is very cool.

Some of these people just don't speak my language, a little too spiritual, not enough science!

Okay, WTF, why does one person cost more than the others? Seriously?

Well, after that exposure to my inside-voice it should be clear that there are a few issues here:

Sally Smith, MD is evidently way cooler than all of the other practitioners. You see, if I would like Sally Smith (who I'd chosen as my "Primary" before the lab-test) it will cost me an additional $50. This sucks. I mean, talk about a buzz-kill.

Feature Request: Please make the consultation expectations a bit more obvious in the future. I thought I got any wellness practitioner/expert I wanted for my $175 (typically $200). If I'd payed the full $200 for the package and then found out I had to pay $50 more for the practitioner I chose before the blood test, that'd be 1/5 more and suck 10 times more.

For those of you skimming, let me break this down for you in short-hand:

Part 1: Buying the product and getting your blood test is simple and easy. There are a few user experience elements on the website that need to be address as you input your personal data. But, it's doable.

Part 2: Selecting the wellness practitioner can be a bit of a let down. You do in-fact get a stable of experts to choose from, but… getting a consultation with a medical doctor will cost you an extra $50. I didn't catch this when I read-up about the features of the Baseline product and in my defense, WellnessFX had two ideal places (Expert Consultations pop-up verbiage and the paragraph: Recommendations to Optimize Your Health) on the product page of their website to mention this medical doctor upgrade charge. In defense of WellnessFX, they do in-fact state this in the FAQs. (bottom of the product page, expand #6)

It reads: "WellnessFX has a wide variety of practitioners available with different backgrounds and specialties. WellnessFX Baseline includes a nutritional consult. If you view your results and decide that you’d like to upgrade to a consult with a medical doctor, you may do so when you schedule your consult."

Tips/notes:

Here are a few tips if you're looking into the Baseline Product from WellnessFX:

The practitioners you see in here, don't really represent what you'll see when you get to the actual picking of practitioners

A consultation with an actual medical doctor (MD), will set you back another $50

Look long and hard for a discount code. They are few and far between but you'll find a few floating around the web or in your email if you can wait it out.

and lastly, a bruise like I've never had before form a blood-draw.

This is the first time in my life that I've paid $175, lost some blood and been this excited all at the same time. This odd collection of happenings started with a @joerogan podcast where his guest was this crazy self appointed self-quantifying guru, Dave Asprey Now, Dave suffers from a bit of social identity crisis but otherwise has some very interesting thoughts on nutrition and overall wellness. "Dave Asprey" is an IT security executive and his split social personality "The Bulletproof Executive" is a self-quantifying, fringe wellness expert. That is, Dave likes to experiment with food, drugs and science to improve himself mentally and physically but doesn't want us to contact him on his "Dave Asprey" twitter account. It's a real sore spot with him. Anyway, in this age of information wealth you have to sink your teeth into the gold coins of knowledge that science pirates like Dave are are selling to see if there is any real substance. It's not just dave either, there are a host of them doing guest spots on the others podcast and all have something to sell. Honestly, the characters dealing these gold coins of information are as convincing as the most crafty pirates of the Caribbean. Everyone has an idea and a method that they can readily produce scientific studies for and all lead to a monitory end. Not that making money is bad but you will have to keep your wits about you and choose wisely what you want to adopt and test for yourself. 

Now that you have some context and people to Google, get to the point. Mr. Bulletproof (Dave) has a podcast of his own (who doesn't) and he interviewed a guy from a company called WellnessFX. They are about as forward thinking as a wellness company can be and free from most of the spiritual ambiance that accompanies the alternate health circles. By this I am saying that I like to keep my spirt and my bio-labs separated. There is just no need for those two worlds to collide for me right now. So, I took a closer look at this company (wellnessFX.com) and what they were selling. Keep in mind that they are selling me gold coins at $200 bucks. But, you can really sink your teeth into this stuff. They are going to give you solid information that you can use now. Not crisis info like "your cholesterol is high, take this for the rest of your life" information that you pay a lot more money to get one day, but information that can keep you from ever having that conversation with your doctor at all. I have to beg my current doctor to order even a few of the types of blood tests that WellnessFX offers in their entry-level package. IF, I do manage to slip a b-12 test into my yearly (insurance covered) blood work-up I have to just wait and see if and how much that will tack on to my standard labs. It's crap. No better word for the way the current medical system works. Good healthcare to me is preventing illness and injury with educated diets and activity. Why should I wait until I am sick to give a damn? That is the twitter-sized version of what WellnessFX is to me. I'll say it again.

Why should I wait until I am sick to give a damn? (can you fit that on a gold coin?)

…and that is what has me more than a little psyched to be 15 hours past my last meal with a lighter wallet and a few tubes of blood sitting in the local LabCorp office. If you're thinking about doing the WellnessFX baseline labs like I did, here are a few suggestions and critiques and rants to think about:

Don't stress the fasting part Fasting is easy if you plan it right. Make sure you blood draw is within a few hours of your usual waking time. The time it takes to wake-up, fed the kids, get a shower and show-up on time will mute any growls from your stomach and before you know it you'll have a tourniquet on your arm and be minutes away from food.   

Come prepared and let the paperwork do all the talking Print all of your paperwork and hand it over to the blood draw tech. It's just that simple. They paperwork says clearly who is to be billed, who ordered the blood draw and what the lab needs to do.   

The Stables have room for a few more horses (Doctors that is) In the downtime between getting your blood drawn and waiting for the results, spend some time looking over the practicers that you'll be choosing from. This is like picking your guru in some epic role-paying game, how awesome is that. Well, this is where WellnessFX could improve the game a bit. In the videos and articles I researched to get a feel for this company and what they offer, they they set the expectation that I'd have stable of wellness practitioners to choose from and finding my guru would be a matter of picking from the stable experts. In reality WellnessFX seems to limit your options to your state (form you sign-up info) and the options I had were really "one or the other", because there was only two doctors/gurus to choose from. I know this company is blowing-up and they will have their ducks in a row later but as for exceptions, that was my first let-down. Small-beans really in the grand scheme. 

In addition to that I have a few random thoughts, just incase they actually read this post. (My gold coins for WellnessFX)

The WellnessFX iOS app is a good idea but lacking in a clear purpose. What I think they are doing is: the idea of the app is to let you list all of your vitamins and medicine that you are taking on a daily basis and then remind you to take them? Being a businessman myself I also see a great resource of data that can be minded to offer deals with partner vitamin companies and future list mailings. Regardless of what it really is, it could be a great tool for tracking your vitamins and generating suggested readings based on current studies and research. I'd love updates on things that I find important enough to supplement everyday. While your at it, connect that app to my account online and let my Wellness practitioner see what I'm taking and make their suggestions in-line with that. Even better… actually, I have an idea that I think is as ground breaking as WellnessFX, but I'll save that one for myself. Every pirate needs his booty :)

So as I am waiting for my results to come-in I am equal parts excited and guarded to see what a Sallie Smith (partitioner) can tell me about my health some very basic sing-up information and bloodworm. It's seem like a huge challenge for a 20 minutes, online conversation. I am not even clear on the technology that will connect us yet. I am however very excited to find out. 

Kudos WellnessFX, don't let me down.

Stuff I mentioned:

http://www.bulletproofexec.com/

@bulletproofexec and @daveasprey

http://joerogan.net/

@joerogan

http://www.wellnessfx.com/