我在 4 家穿戴裝置公司的服務下驗血，結果令我猛然醒覺

For years, my wearables told me I was the picture of health.

I got my steps in, exercised regularly, and got glowing sleep and cardio fitness reviews. They even had me believing I could turn back time, telling me my “health age” was at least eight years younger than my actual age. So I got cocky.

I wore those numbers like a badge of honor, and leaned on them to justify skipping my annual checkup in favor of the 55 other pediatrician and dentist appointments I have to squeeze in as a working mother of three.

It took one blood test to bring me back down to earth and rattle my perception of health tracking. Because, despite doing everything “right,” my bloodwork revealed I had high cholesterol. Not borderline, not slightly elevated, but midway up the orange warning zone high.

Wearable companies like Whoop, Oura, Ultrahuman and, most recently, Apple now offer blood panels through their apps, adding another layer of information to the heart rate, sleep, activity and other health metrics they’ve collected data on for years.

The goal is a more complete picture of your health, on the platform where you already track everything else. The irony is that if it hadn’t been for my wearables, the very things that had lulled me into this false sense of security in the first place, my high cholesterol might have gone undetected for years.

My Wearables Said I Was Healthy, but My Bloodwork Had Other Ideas

The same could be true for many Americans, who struggle with access to a regular physician, whether it be due to time constraints, lack of medical insurance or local availability. Affordability is a big reason: A report from the US Federal Reserve estimated that 26% of Americans delayed medical treatment due to cost in 2025. But any number of factors keep people out of the doctor’s office.

Blood tests offered by wearable companies are also attempting to fill that gap with their own solutions, extending the trust people already put in their health-tracking devices to new metrics only attainable through drawing blood. Some of these services are door-to-door, while others require trips to medical labs, but the pitch is the same: Let the brands that already monitor your health go one step further.

“A conversation about one blood test can be a very helpful first step,” says Dr. Eve Glazier, an internal medicine physician and president of the UCLA Health Faculty Practice Group. “And then it’s the ongoing relationship that gives us the opportunity to build that context, revisit decisions and see what you’re doing over time.”

The convenience of getting bloodwork through these apps opened the door. What I found on the other side was a series of more doors, and more questions, that ultimately led me to the very place I’d been avoiding: the doctor’s office.

The missing clues in your blood

Blood tests outside the doctor’s office aren’t novel. There’s an entire industry built around them, with companies like Hone and SiPhox offering lab diagnostics for a fee. But blood testing landed in my orbit about a year ago, when it started popping up inside the apps of many of the wearables I review.

As someone whose job it is to review these products (and who has a serious case of FOMO), I had to know why. What can blood tell me that my wearable can’t already? And why are all these companies suddenly interested in my blood?

From left, the Whoop MG, Ultrahuman Ring Pro, Oura Ring 5 and Apple Watch Series 12, the four wearables whose apps I used to schedule bloodwork.

Wearable companies built their health features around what their hardware, including optical and electrical sensors, can measure: heart rate, heart rate variability, blood oxygen saturation, sleep and physical activity. And while those sensors continue to improve, there’s still a lot that lies beyond their reach.

“The initial entry was physiology. … But obviously it’s pretty natural to expand all this out to get a more comprehensive view, and the blood tests add to that,” says Michael Snyder, professor of genetics and director of the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine at Stanford University. “If you dive deeper, you do see a lot more.”

This includes catching conditions before symptoms appear.

Blood tests can reveal cholesterol — which, in higher-than-normal quantities in your blood, could increase the risk of heart disease and stroke — as well as thyroid function, iron and hormone levels, along with markers of liver, kidney and metabolic health, none of which a typical wearable measures directly. Some of those markers connect to what your wearable tracks, while others don’t.

I assumed my strong VO2 max, a measure of how much oxygen your body can use during intense exercise, meant my heart was healthy and I didn’t have to worry about cholesterol. I was wrong.

“There’s no correlation between the VO2 max and cholesterol because they work in different pathways, but there is a correlation between your VO2 max and your hemoglobin,” says Dr. Mukul Mittal, medical director at Ultrahuman, who runs the company’s Performance Lab in Bangalore, India.

This means I literally can’t outrun my high cholesterol. On the other hand, having low hemoglobin — the stuff in your red blood cells that carries oxygen — could drag down my VO2 max.

“If you are somebody who’s anemic [low hemoglobin], your blood is not carrying enough oxygen. [That] directly affects your VO2 max,” Mittal explains.

But there’s no round-the-clock blood tracker you can strap to your wrist. And if you’re feeling fine, getting your bloodwork done isn’t exactly at the top of your to-do list, especially if you’re already skipping your annual checkup.

“Nobody goes when they’re healthy,” Snyder says. “If something goes off right after your annual physical and you wait two years to get it detected again, by then you’re down a bad path.”

Bringing blood testing into the apps people already use could do for cholesterol what Fitbit did for steps, and get otherwise healthy people like me paying attention to what’s in our blood.

‘Healthy’ people might be the prime target

In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have to pay out of pocket to get bloodwork through my wearable. I’d have a primary care doctor who knows my medical history, orders the tests I need and helps me make sense of the results.

But the realities of the US healthcare system make it more challenging, especially if you’re not already sick.

I’ve lived in five cities since graduating college, so establishing a primary care doctor each time always felt like another chore. I know I’ve had blood panels over the years, but I couldn’t tell you much about the results beyond the “you’re fine” call afterward.

I’ve also had three kids in the last decade and spent years getting poked, prodded and tested. In my mind, if something were wrong, surely it would’ve surfaced somewhere along the way.

From left: the Apple Wallet pass I used to check in at Quest for Apple’s blood test, removing the needle after my blood draw, the “I survived” thumbs-up, a lab technician reviewing my details and the blood pressure check.

Glazier says many people don’t establish regular primary care until their 40s, when recommended screenings start bringing them into the health care system more consistently. Women, in particular, may already be getting some of that care through their OB-GYN.

Rather than pulling people away from their doctors, blood testing through wearable companies could bring them in by reducing friction and making bloodwork something they can initiate through an app they already use.

Joe Pehanick, a 39-year-old Whoop wearer and business owner, signed up for the company’s twice-yearly blood-testing service soon after it launched. He still sees a primary care physician, but likes the idea of establishing a baseline while he’s healthy, so he has something to bring to his doctor to compare against down the road once something does seem off.

“I’m just filing it all away. … I figure 10 years’ worth of blood tests, plus the Whoop data, is some of the best investment I can make,” he says. “A doctor, anybody, could look back and go, OK, look at all this data, look at everything that’s changed over time, or not changed.”

Snyder argues that changes over time can sometimes be more revealing than whether a single result falls within the normal range. He recalls someone in his research cohort whose liver enzyme level doubled between tests but remained within the normal range, so nothing was flagged. By the time Snyder suggested a third test, the level had shot up even further, this time landing outside of range.

“The point is it was a trajectory that mattered,” Snyder says. “That was more important than where he was relative to everybody else in the US population.”

Take my blood: Ultrahuman, Oura, Whoop and Apple compared

Sold on the idea of a baseline and on the convenience, I put all four services to the test.

The basic process is similar across all four: Open the app, hunt for the blood-testing section (and I truly mean hunt), choose a panel and schedule your blood draw. The hardest part was finding the option in the first place, and this seemed to be universally challenging. Companies clearly don’t want the bloodwork overshadowing the main event, since I had to search within mazes of drop-down menus and hidden tabs.

There were definite standouts, but no clear winner. A lot comes down to where you already store your health data. If you’re deep in Apple’s ecosystem and use the Health app as your hub, it makes sense to keep your bloodwork there, too. The same logic applies if you already use Oura, Whoop or Ultrahuman.

You don’t necessarily need the hardware, either. Apple, Whoop and Ultrahuman let you use their blood-testing services without owning their wearables, though to me it wouldn’t make much sense to use these apps if I wasn’t already there for my wearable data. Otherwise, there are plenty of other ways to order blood tests, including directly through the lab.

Since I started testing these services in October 2025, when some of them were in their infancy — Apple’s didn’t even exist yet — some of the exact steps I describe may have changed by now. They’ve also had a year to iron out the kinks, so the services I tested most recently benefit from having learned from competitors.

Plans and pricing: Comparing each service

Prices and testing frequency vary significantly, though it’s worth noting that they’re all eligible for Health Savings Account plans, which just under 60 million Americans had last year, according to the Paragon Health Institute.

Whoop and Ultrahuman have the widest range of options, including specialized hormone, hair health, sleep and even cancer screening panels. Apple and Oura have a basic a la carte option through the US-based clinical lab Quest Diagnostics rather than as a yearly subscription.

Scheduling and handing over my blood

Ultrahuman was the first service I tested, and it definitely won me over on convenience. For an additional $50 to $75, the blood draw came to me. But that convenience also meant I completely forgot they were coming.

I got wrapped up in my day, operated on autopilot and ate breakfast (the test required fasting). So I was genuinely startled when the doorbell rang, and there was a woman standing at my doorstep toting 12 empty vials, ready to steal my blood like a vampire.

Once she arrived, though, the process was seamless. She confirmed my identity, I confirmed that she was, in fact, a Quest employee and not a vampire, and she proceeded to fill all 12 vials right on my dining room table next to the crusty yogurt my kids had scarfed down a few hours earlier. The fact that I didn’t fast ruled out a few biomarkers relating to blood glucose and cholesterol, but the majority of the 106 biomarkers were still valid.

My at-home blood draw with Ultrahuman. From left, 12 empty vials looking intimidating, the convenience of a blood draw in the same room my kids had destroyed a few hours earlier and what 12 vials of my blood look like once they’re full.

The other three services — Oura, Whoop and Apple — sent me to my local Quest lab to get my blood drawn in the old-fashioned way. Scheduling was easy: I picked a location and time, got calendar reminders and could reschedule even less than 24 hours out.

My Oura and Whoop check-ins hit one snag, partly of my own making. I’d booked the appointments under my married name, while my driver’s license still had my maiden name. That caused some confusion when the staff tried to find my lab orders. We eventually sorted it out using my date of birth and a photo of my passport.

Lesson learned: Make sure the name on your appointment matches your ID, and keep a copy of the lab order handy just in case.

Apple’s check-in was the smoothest. I added a pass with a QR code to Apple Wallet and walked into the Quest lab like I was boarding a plane, QR code in hand. I scanned it and boom: ready to go. No ID or maiden-name identity crisis to be had.

Not all results are created equal

The bloodwork is the main piece of the puzzle, but how the results are presented plays a big part in understanding them (or not). A long stretch of my year was dedicated to testing each of the four services with repeated blood draws, waiting for results and parsing their meaning. Each wearable company has its own pros and cons, and some weren’t even in their full release — Apple’s blood analysis service is still in beta.

Ultrahuman

Ultrahuman’s presentation is perhaps the most straightforward. Results appear on a slider showing whether each biomarker is in or out of range, with borderline and out-of-range results flagged at the top. You can also filter by value and zero in on the ones that need attention.

I later found an option to generate a clinician report (after scrolling all the way to the bottom), which gave me a more comprehensive overview of my flagged results. An Action Plan tab suggested specific changes I could make to my routine, from diet to supplements, ranked by potential impact.

I appreciated that last part. A laundry list of supplements can get daunting fast, so I focused on the high-impact recommendations, like adding omega-3s and soluble fiber.

If you have more questions, there’s also Jade, Ultrahuman’s AI chatbot. It’s the only AI assistant among the services I tested that you can access for free, though that access is limited to a credit system of five questions. Run out of credits mid-conversation, and you’ll have to wait four hours for them to reset or pay $4 a month for unlimited credits.

Oura

Oura’s blood report is similar, minus the clinician report and action plan. Its blood panel gives you a top-level summary, flags biomarkers that are out of range and lets you ask the company’s Oura Advisor AI chatbot follow-up questions as part of Oura’s $6 a month membership.

But it also has a human safety net. Oura partners with SteadyMD and says a clinician will contact you if one or more results are critically out of range. Apparently, mine weren’t critical enough to trigger a call because I never got one.

If you want more help, Oura also offers Counsel Health through Oura Labs, a separate medical chat service that lets you message with a physician who can review your labs and, when needed, prescribe medication. The first question is free, while the unlimited version costs $159 a year, and you get to talk to an actual human physician rather than an overconfident AI chatbot that might lead you down the wrong path (more on that later). Oura also has its own AI chatbot, called Advisor.

Whoop

Whoop took over a week to surface the results (a bit longer than the rest), but once they arrived, I found them the easiest to understand based on user interface, navigation and actual content.

Along with the individual numbers, I got a physician report (from a human doctor) explaining what each biomarker measured, where my result landed and what I could do about it. My action plan included adding morning sun exposure and supplements to improve my vitamin D levels; adding more nuts, fruits and vegetables to my diet; and incorporating 30 minutes of low-impact cardio into my day to help with my cholesterol, which I did. If I wanted to go deeper, I could continue the conversation with Whoop’s AI assistant.

I could then add those recommendations to my Whoop plan and see the exercise, diet and supplement changes together as daily actions. And since my Whoop band tracks my workouts and outdoor time, it could help keep me honest.

One note on all of these AI assistants: Chatbots are known to hallucinate, or make up information that they present as factual. They’re also not for medical diagnosis or treatment. You should take their health and wellness advice with a grain of salt and cross-check with a physician before implementing any of it. It’s also inadvisable to give an AI tool any sensitive personal information, as there’s a risk your data could be leaked or otherwise compromised.

Apple

Of the four services I tested, Apple’s had the most human interaction. Ironically, it was also the only one without a dedicated AI health assistant.

I tested Apple’s blood-testing service in beta, and as of publication, it still isn’t publicly available. The service is part of Apple’s redesigned Health app, which the company says will launch later this year.

Even though my results weren’t critically out of range, I received a call three days after my blood draw, flagging my high cholesterol and asking whether I wanted to schedule a follow-up with a clinician. I said yes.

Not long after that, I received a call from a physician who spent about 15 minutes walking me through my results, explaining the different cholesterol numbers and discussing some of the dietary changes I’d already made. I wish I’d been able to have the results with me and follow along, but they hadn’t surfaced on the app yet. And even with my numbers closer to the normal range, he recommended following up with a primary care doctor and potentially a specialist, given I have a family history of high cholesterol.

His recommendations weren’t too different from the ones I’d pieced together from the other apps, but after months of texting behind a screen with AI agents and Googling cholesterol markers, it was refreshing to be able to hold a live phone conversation with a real human who was qualified to give medical advice.

Within hours of the calls, I started seeing the results pop up on the app. Yellow warning symbols highlighted out-of-range markers, and some even came with personalized explainer videos featuring an Apple physician, Dr. Mike Natter. He walked me through what each marker meant and how my results fit into the picture. The videos looked so personalized that I had to stalk him on Instagram just to verify he was the real deal, and not an AI-generated doctor.

But Apple’s experience was also the most scattered. My results were spread across different parts of the Health app, and figuring out where to find everything took some digging. The Heart section of the Longevity tab shows my cardiovascular markers and cholesterol results, but that’s only part of the picture. For a broader view, I had to head to the Labs tab under Assessments, where results are grouped by category but still take several clicks to explore. I also ran into a few links that led to empty pages.

To be fair, I was testing a beta version, so it’s hard to judge the finished experience. Some of these quirks may be ironed out by the time it launches publicly.

How often should you test?

The Oura Ring 5, Ultrahuman Ring Pro, Whoop MG band and Apple Watch Series 12 on my arm.Cole Kan/Celso Bulgatti/CNET

How often you should get your blood tested depends on what you’re testing, whether something needs to change and how aggressively you’re trying to change it. Ultrahuman’s Mittal recommends testing at least once a year for a generally healthy person. Whoop’s chief medical officer, Dr. Ami Bhatt, says there’s no single schedule.

“Some markers, such as cholesterol, tend to change more gradually, while others, including cortisol and CRP, can fluctuate more frequently,” she says.

If something comes back abnormal and you’re trying to fix it, testing more often can show whether what you’re doing is working.

“If you’ve been diagnosed with a deficiency and you’ve been given medication or a supplement, [it] might be earlier as well. For example, eight to 12 weeks,” Mittal says.

My first two tests were 10 months apart, and the results barely budged (aside from the markers affected by fasting). But the second test confirmed what I’d hoped was a fluke: high cholesterol. Without the fasting excuse this time, those orange sliders and “out of range” labels finally scared me into action.

The logical next step was finding a primary care doctor and potentially a cardiologist. Like many people, I had neither, and somehow overhauling my entire diet felt easier than navigating the bureaucratic maze of finding a doctor who accepted my insurance, getting an appointment and potentially waiting for a referral to a specialist who might tell me the same things the apps already had.

I also wanted to avoid medication. Part of me worried a doctor would jump straight to prescribing something, so I figured I’d see how much I could change on my own first.

Turns out, I was only half right to worry. Mittal says guidelines recommend statins for people with LDL cholesterol of 190 mg/dL or higher, because diet and exercise alone may not be enough to bring it down. But my numbers weren’t that high. And as Glazier explained, deciding whether someone needs medication isn’t as simple as looking at their cholesterol. There’s a lot more to consider.

Had I known that going in, I might have saved myself a few rabbit holes. But at the time, I only had the data from Oura and Ultrahuman, and both AI agents concurred in their advice to see a doctor to prevent long-term risks (much to my dismay) and to make similar lifestyle changes, including changing diet and upping exercise.

For me, that meant cutting cheese, egg yolks and, the one that stung the most, my whole-milk cappuccino — something I looked forward to as a non-morning person. I also started sprinkling flaxseed on whatever I could tolerate.

My next test, through Whoop, came right after Apple’s September launch event, which required a marathon of coverage, leading to bad sleep and eating whatever happened to be in front of me. Yet despite this, my numbers were clearly moving in the right direction. Total cholesterol, as well as other markers like bad cholesterol and ApoB (a count of the cholesterol-carrying particles that can clog arteries), had all dropped.

By the time the final test with Apple’s service rolled around, I was in a groove with my new healthy habits, and I had the numbers to prove it. My total cholesterol had dipped just below the threshold and was now considered in the healthy range, and most other markers had improved, too.

For me, the frequent testing gave me confirmation that my sacrifices were working, and kept me on track. But they also showed me how overwhelming that data can be for someone without medical advice.

The context gap

Colorful graphs and AI chatbots can only tell you so much. Even after a year of poring over cholesterol results, I still feel like a toddler who stumbled into a college-level biology class. I keep having to Google which cholesterol is the good kind, which one should be low, where triglycerides fit in and what all of it means for my long-term cardiovascular risk.

And despite all the explanations, the AI assistants and reports I got from these apps, I was still largely left to my own devices. Some of my research rabbit holes quickly turned into full-blown spirals, and I found myself in the occasional panic over a missed workout or what I was allowed to eat that day.

That’s because the apps only show a red line or a green line. Only a physician looking at the entire context would be able to ease the anxiety that comes from seeing a matrix of unexplained red or green on a screen. There’s a fine line between being informed and becoming obsessed with the numbers, and there’s a lot of gray area even between those.

If I’d had a doctor like Glazier in my corner, I might’ve been able to skip through some of that.

“As a primary care physician, my job is really to understand what a result means for the person sitting in front of me, and not just in a snapshot, but over time,” she says.

A flagged result doesn’t automatically mean something is wrong, let alone that it requires treatment, according to Glazier. She also mentioned that the exact parameters of each test can vary by provider and even location, and since they’re only a snapshot of that particular day, they might not always be representative of the general patterns outside of that bad day or stressful week.

I seemed to have landed on some sensible changes to my diet. But relying on my own research and AI advice could just as easily have sent me in the wrong direction.

“An AI assistant will be a very, very important part of your health management,” Snyder says. “But you have to realize they’re not 100% right.”

Snyder learned that firsthand when he threw out his back. An AI chatbot advised him on what might be wrong, but it missed a herniated disc that an MRI later revealed. Had he settled for that AI-generated diagnosis, the physical therapy exercises that went with it might have aggravated his injury and delayed his recovery.

The privacy issue

The other problem with my having all this information about my health is that now these companies have it, too. They already know how I sleep, how much I exercise I do and what my heart is doing throughout the day. Now they have my cholesterol, hormones, liver and kidney markers, too.

Which brings me back to my original question: What do they want with my blood?

Probably not the money they’re charging for the tests, at least according to Snyder. And considering the price of ordering labs directly through Quest runs the same or higher, he might be right.

“I don’t think they’re making any money off these subscriptions,” he says.

My biggest fear, aside from the irrational “someone selling my cholesterol on the dark web and building a digital clone of me” scenario, was that my bloodwork could somehow end up with my health insurer and come back to haunt me in the form of higher premiums.

But according to Kirk Nahra, a health privacy attorney at the law firm WilmerHale, that’s not how health insurance generally works today. Under the Affordable Care Act, insurers can’t charge people more for individual health coverage just because they have high cholesterol.

“We have reduced that risk because of how health insurance law works, not because of how privacy law works,” he says.

Those protections aren’t guaranteed forever, though. “It’s a combination of HIPAA and the Affordable Care Act. It might change,” Nahra says. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, regularly shortened to HIPAA, is a federal privacy law restricting the release of medical information.

Data breaches are another story. They’ve happened in hospitals, and handing over my bloodwork to more companies means more places it could potentially be exposed.

“The more people you give your data to, the more people that could have data breaches,” Nahra says.

And unlike a stolen credit card, there’s not much you can do once your health information is out there. Nahra handles these cases professionally, and he says there isn’t always a clear next step for consumers.

“We don’t have a process,” he says. Apparently, there’s no cholesterol version of canceling your credit card yet.

Snyder thinks a more likely use for all this data is helping companies build better health predictions and AI tools.

Companies already collecting years of wearable data alongside bloodwork could be in a good position to develop those tools or partner with others who are. But sharing health data isn’t a free-for-all, either.

HIPAA covers some health information, but not all, because it depends on who owns that information. According to Nahra, the same bloodwork can have different protections depending on who’s holding it. A lab or doctor’s office is generally covered by HIPAA. A consumer health app generally isn’t.

We shouldn’t assume tech companies are rushing to sell health charts with your name at the top. Nahra says selling identifiable health data is “very hard to do.”

But information that’s been deidentified, with details like names and birth dates removed, can fall under different rules and may be used or shared for research and other purposes. So while my name might not be on it, my cholesterol still could be.

All four companies let you request data deletion, but after reading through their various privacy policies, canceling your account isn’t always enough.

You can ask Ultrahuman to delete your data via email, though it retains some information for legal or fraud-prevention purposes and deidentified data for longer. You can request that Oura delete your data at any point, and it told CNET over email that it doesn’t sell data to third parties. You can ask Whoop to delete health data through its Privacy Center or by email — canceling a membership alone doesn’t trigger it. Apple lets you delete results directly in the Health app. It also can’t read Health data synced to iCloud when end-to-end encryption is enabled with two-factor authentication and a passcode.

Labs handling your blood panels like the one I used, Quest Diagnostics, may retain their own records (this would be protected by HIPAA when held by a covered lab).

As for AI, Oura told CNET it doesn’t allow third-party AI companies to train on member data, but it didn’t say whether it uses blood test results to train its own AI model. Whoop’s policy allows the use of deidentified data for research and development, while Ultrahuman’s describes developing machine-learning algorithms “to improve targeting” of its products, with consent. Apple’s consumer health privacy policy doesn’t specifically address AI training on blood test results.

Snyder is comfortable with those privacy trade-offs. He believes the benefits of sharing his health data outweigh the risks.

“I have two petabytes of data you could download right now,” he says.

I’m not quite at that level. But I do see the value in what I got out of this, even if I’m still figuring out how much information I’m comfortable handing over.

Besides, at this point, my Google search history likely reveals more about my cholesterol than my actual bloodwork does.

Nahra’s advice is to tread carefully and read the fine print to know who you’re sharing your data with, so the trade-off is up to you and not decided for you.

“Try to understand what you’re getting out of it and think about what they’re getting out of it,” he says.

Bottom line: A tool, not a replacement

I started off skeptical that I even needed to add bloodwork to the list of health metrics I track, convinced I was only going to get boring, in-range results. Instead, I became both the target audience for these services and the subject of my own case study.

But the biggest irony isn’t that my cholesterol was high, though that was a slap in the face. It’s that after a year of poring over results, researching them and going back and forth with AI chatbots, I still ended up in the same place I would have if I’d gone the traditional route: at the doctor’s office.

The difference is that I might not have gotten there otherwise. And now I’m going in with a year’s worth of results, a better understanding of my health and something specific to focus on, especially since I’m building that PCP-patient relationship from scratch.

“Doctors, at the end of the day, are trying to be really good detectives,” Pehanick, the Whoop user, says. “If I’m asking a doctor to save my life or prescribe, I want them to have literally the best information available to them.

Glazier welcomes those extra clues, with a caveat. “I like information, as long as we set mutual expectations,” she says. That might mean repeating a test with her own lab or ordering ones the app didn’t. Bringing in your own results, she says, “is not necessarily going to expedite a clinical decision.”

If you’re already seeing your doctor regularly and getting the bloodwork you need, you may not have much to gain from paying extra for one of these services.

But if you’re like me, feeling healthy and wondering what else you might be missing, they offer a relatively low-friction way to start. Just don’t jump to conclusions without first talking to an actual human doctor who can help you see the big picture.

I still need a doctor to help evaluate my risk and figure out the long-term plan. And frankly, I’d welcome having someone else shoulder some of that responsibility instead of trying to figure it all out myself.

Even with a doctor, though, not everyone feels heard. Glazier says some of her patients turn to these services because “they haven’t felt listened to appropriately,” or have a symptom that hasn’t been resolved, and having your own data can help you push for answers.

A year later, I’ve managed to lower my total cholesterol by about 45 points, without medication. That alone has been worth the information overload and potential privacy risks. But there’s a small part of me that still longs for that blissful ignorance of those whole milk cappuccino days.

Visual Designer | Cole Kan

Art Director | Jeffrey Hazelwood

Creative Director | Viva Tung

Video Host | Vanessa Hand Orellana

Video Producer | Celso Bulgatti

Video Editor | Dillon Lopez

Project Manager | Danielle Ramirez

Editors | Corinne Reichert, David Lumb

Director of Content | Jonathan Skillings

Vanessa Hand Orellana

Principal Writer

Vanessa is a lead writer at CNET, reviewing and writing about the latest smartwatches and fitness trackers. She joined the brand first as an on-camera reporter for CNET's Spanish-language site, then moved on to the English side to host and produce some of CNET's videos and YouTube series. When she's not testing out the latest health tech, you can catch her on a hike or trail run with her family. See full bio