> For example Organic Acids in Urine Test gives you some 70-80 metabolic markers, which some folks interpret.
The alternative medicine people use these tests because when you measure 80 different things you are almost guaranteed that some of them will come up high or low.
What they don’t explain is that many of them are expected to fluctuate and will show up with very different values on different days or depending on what you’ve eaten or when you’re taking the test.
They like it because they can tell you that you are too low in this thing and therefore you need to take this other supplement, every time someone takes the test.
For someone who isn’t getting answers from regular doctors it feels like a miracle that someone finally tested them, diagnosed them, and gave them something to take with a simple explanation of why it explains everything. This is the perfect recipe for placebo responses, which are common.
The forums are interesting to read because most people who do these and take the supplements will be very positive at first, but then over time they go back and take another test and find the results are completely different because it’s so random.
Organic acids tests are mostly only useful in the context of diagnosing specific genetic deficiencies which produce severe changes in the test results. The minor ups and downs that the alternative medicine people try to use are not diagnostic, especially with only a single test.
This has been my experience. After not getting answers for a long time from conventional doctors, I went to a naturopath out of desperation. I was diagnosed with "mold toxicity", and took a bunch of supplements to boost all the low levels I had (B12 and cortisol). I also took flax seeds to help with "detox". All the stuff helped a bit, but only a bit. It was still just symptom fighting.
Now to be fair, there are people whose lives have been changed by these treatments, because in some cases someone just happens to be low in some essential micronutrient, and seeing a naturopath solves that when a traditional doctor didn't do a broad assay. But it still doesn't help people like me where whatever is happening can't be described by surface level blood tests and treatments. Naturopaths talk about "wholistic health", but if it's so wholistic, why don't they consider intermediate reactions? So it's become a life goal of mine to build a quantitative metabolic reaction database. I'm currently a applied math major with a chemistry minor, so in a couple years I hope to be able to make some headway on this.
The alternative medicine people use these tests because when you measure 80 different things you are almost guaranteed that some of them will come up high or low.
What they don’t explain is that many of them are expected to fluctuate and will show up with very different values on different days or depending on what you’ve eaten or when you’re taking the test.
They like it because they can tell you that you are too low in this thing and therefore you need to take this other supplement, every time someone takes the test.
For someone who isn’t getting answers from regular doctors it feels like a miracle that someone finally tested them, diagnosed them, and gave them something to take with a simple explanation of why it explains everything. This is the perfect recipe for placebo responses, which are common.
The forums are interesting to read because most people who do these and take the supplements will be very positive at first, but then over time they go back and take another test and find the results are completely different because it’s so random.
Organic acids tests are mostly only useful in the context of diagnosing specific genetic deficiencies which produce severe changes in the test results. The minor ups and downs that the alternative medicine people try to use are not diagnostic, especially with only a single test.