This is dedicated to everyone who has ever seen a red H next to a lab value and immediately planned their funeral.
We talk a lot about what's missing in healthcare. And it's not because there aren't truly great medical professionals out there, it likely has much more to do with the way insurance companies control the breakeven of a business they're not involved in and hospital groups refusal to share a menu of prices for procedures they do all the time, but that's a post for a different day...
No one should be afraid to address or make decisions about their health… whether that fear stems from not wanting to know if something is wrong, worrying that every symptom means something catastrophic, seeing an abnormal lab value in a patient portal with no explanation, or simply not understanding what happens next. And health anxiety doesn't always look like someone constantly going to the doctor. Sometimes it looks like avoiding the doctor altogether or googling a slightly elevated lab value at midnight and mentally jumping ten steps ahead. Other times, it's requesting every test available because more information feels like it should create more certainty.
One of my biggest health anxieties stemmed from being told, "everything looks fine," but leaving the appointment no more reassuring because no one explained what fine actually meant and I didn’t feel fine.
The answer to health anxiety isn’t necessarily more testing, more appointments, or more data. There’s a lot of companies that do testing and we’re one of them. HOWEVER, without appropriate interpretation, more information and labs can create more anxiety and we think what people need is context.
Context is understanding not only whether a result falls outside a reference range, but how much it matters. Because it’s important to know whether the solve is to treat something, monitor it, retest it, refer it out, or simply not be concerned about it and why and how long it would be before we were concerned. We want out patients to understand what we're watching for and what would cause us to change course from an outlined plan. The education that context brings to a care plan doesn't mean promising that nothing will ever be wrong. And although we view ourselves as preventive medicine, good healthcare and good providers can't, and shouldn't, promise that.
What we can promise is that we won't unnecessarily add to the anxiety by leaving you without context, a plan, or a way to ask questions.
I used to hate seeing blood work results land in my inbox without any explanation of what they mean or how they fit into the bigger picture of my health and wellness goals. At TAC, our providers review your labs in context. That means looking at what's outside the reference range, but also looking at patterns, trends, symptoms, history, and the relationship between different markers rather than leaving you to interpret individual values yourself. If we’re doing something to address a specific value, you’ll know what that tactic is.
We build plans by reverse engineering your goals. When something is abnormal, you'll understand whether we're treating it, monitoring it, retesting it, referring it out, or simply not particularly concerned about it right now. And if our level of concern is low, we'll explain why and what would need to change for us to become concerned.
"Let's keep an eye on it" should not be the entire plan. If we're watching something, we'll tell you what we're watching for, when we're looking at it again, and what would cause us to change course. You'll know the timeline and what we plan to do when we get there.
You shouldn't have to choose between Googling something at 11:47 p.m. and waiting three months for another appointment. You can email, call, or text us with questions. If your question needs more time or a more nuanced conversation, we'll book an appointment—and the best part is that your appointments are included.
So how does the above differ from healthcare now? And how do you know that you won't have the same anxieties with us as you do with your PCP?
Traditional healthcare is often built around snapshots: your annual physical, an acute problem, a screening that's due, an abnormal result that needs to be addressed and the appointments are often a snapshot: How are you today? Has anything been bothering you this year? What needs attention? What screening is due? Is anything dangerous? It's almost impossible to remember little things from the course of the year that aren't big enough to schedule a sick appointment for, but that aren't nothing. Our care model can be the through line: Where are we trying to go? What did we learn last time? Did the intervention work? What's changing over time and how is it changing? What do we do next? And once it's resolved, how are we planning moving forward?
And this is where we should probably clarify: we love a PCP. Everyone should have one. There is absolutely a time and a place for traditional primary care, and there are things your PCP should be doing that we aren't trying to replace. We like to think of ourselves at this moment as less as an alternative to your PCP and more as the connective tissue between those visits.
If your goal is to improve your metabolic health, navigate perimenopause, lose weight, understand why you're exhausted, or simply feel better than you do today, we don't want to have that conversation once and pick it back up at your physical next year. We want to establish where you are, decide where you're trying to go, create a plan to get there, measure whether it's working, and keep adjusting as your body and your goals change. That's the role our team is designed to play.
We don't need to be the only provider you see. We want to be the provider and team making sure the things that matter to you don't get lost in between. And for someone with health anxiety, this is the kind of advocacy and continuity that helps lessen anxiety. Instead of every new symptom, lab value, or question feeling like an entirely new problem to solve, there's already a provider who knows the history, understands the plan, knows what we're watching, and can help put new information into context.
The goal isn't to promise you that there's never anything to worry about. It's to make sure you're not left alone to decide what you should be worried about.
