Blood Draws

I will note that the body strips bones of calcium to maintain pH balance in the blood so I'm skeptical that blood draws are the optimal means to measure anything in the body

I'm working on adding a log. In the process, I tend to reread a lot of posts, check for typos, do some clean up. 

I work solo. Editing your own writing is extremely, extremely hard. 

You know what you meant. You may not know how stupid what you actually said sounds until you reread it months later.

I have been managing a serious, life-threatening medical condition for years. I track symptoms rather than get medical testing. There is an example of that on this site: Fingernails 

And I have repeatedly linked to a piece elsewhere called Skeptics with instructions to start a health journal and check it yourself. 

The reason I say I'm skeptical that blood draws are the optimal means to measure anything is because with it being known that the body strips calcium from the bones to maintain pH balance, that tells you that the body damages other tissues for the express purpose of giving the blood what it needs to function. So it absolutely is not a clear, bright line indication that everything is okay "because the blood levels are good."

If you have osteoporosis but your blood draws look good, your blood draws are lying. Everything is not okay.

So what else is modern medical practice missing because we do blood draws and test blood levels without really having a clear context in many cases as to what that means?

I was prone to anemia for years and suffered from restless leg syndrome. I read an article that said restless leg syndrome can be due to vitamin B deficiency or iron deficiency. 

These are known underlying causes of anemia. So I began taking a B vitamin supplement at bedtime when my restless leg syndrome was keeping me awake and if that didn't resolve it, thirty minutes later I would take iron.

It's hard to poison yourself with B vitamins. It's entirely possible to get iron poisoning. So I was being conservative. 

At some point, I stopped being chronically anemic and eventually developed sudden onset symptoms of iron poisoning. I have a genetic disorder. I was like "What changed? WHERE was the iron hiding?"

I eventually concluded this was due to trypanasoma die off. Parasitic infections are known to scavenge iron. If something in your system dies, the body has to deal with the detritus and dump or resorb the nutritional building blocks involved. 

I can't recall the last time I explicitly treated for anemia. Most likely, my anemia was caused by a parasitic infection gobbling up all the iron it could get and making more nasty little beasties living inside me.

Without taking a tissue sample, you don't know. Blood draws aren't the whole picture and I'm not thrilled with the idea of doctors defaulting to tissue samples.

So my preference is symptom tracking and learning enough about pertinent pieces of the problem to make reasonable inferences.

Testing can be valuable. It finally got me a better name for my condition than "whiny bitch" or "hypochondriac." But I think there's room for improvement in how we assess medical stuff.

If you are trans, whether you DIY it or have a supervising physician, I think keeping a journal, reading a lot pertinent to your situation and figuring out how to track symptoms will serve you well even if you can and do get blood draws.

Blood draws are not a comprehensive picture and I'm not even trans. I'm some chick with a weirdo hobby who reads stuff on the internet and I've already seen discussions that suggest we don't really have a good idea of what is going on and blood draws aren't telling us what we need to know for the trans community.