Where I Stand on Routine Extensive Blood Testing

This essay marks the start of a two-year partnership between Ajenda and Function Health.

I want to start with something that happened to me personally, because it's the clearest argument I can make for everything that follows. When I started doing extensive annual bloodwork through Function Health, I learned that my mercury level was high. Not borderline high, but genuinely elevated. Actually, it was triple the upper limit of normal. One of the symptoms tied to that level, it turns out, is hair loss, which I'd been quietly attributing to age and stress. I would have never known this from a standard annual physical. My regular bloodwork, the kind most of us get once a year if we're lucky, doesn't test for heavy metals unless there's already a specific reason to suspect it. I didn't have a reason. I just had the data.

That's the entire case for extensive routine testing, in one story. You don't know what you don't know, and our medical system, structurally, is built to find and treat disease, not to proactively surface what's quietly going wrong before it becomes one. If I had gone into my doctor’s office and requested heavy metal testing, there is a very high chance he would have thought I was crazy, because mercury testing is not part of the routine blood testing battery. Ponder that: A doctor asking for a blood test would have likely been dismissed as paranoid!

Why I'm partnering with Function

I am incredibly selective when it comes to choosing brands or companies with whom to partner. The key word is “partner” because doing straight endorsement campaigns really doesn’t interest me—and we get offers almost every day. Here’s how I decide in general, and why Function made the cut: I have to actually use the service or product myself, and I have to believe in the science behind it. In addition, it needs to be in my lane of expertise, so when I recommend it to friends, family, and followers, I can do so with my medical and professional credentials backing it. And lastly, I only partner with companies and brands for whom I can play a role behind the scenes, as well as in the public-facing realm.

Function meets all of my criteria. I was a Function member long before we started talking about working together. I believe in the value of preventive health screening and agree with the need for greater patient autonomy in our healthcare system. As a doctor who is double board-certified in OB-GYN and obesity medicine and as a nutritionist, I know what kind of testing Function offers that generally gets missed in traditional healthcare encounters. I’m excited to announce that I have joined Function’s prestigious Medical Advisory Board, specifically to represent my medical specialties in guiding their development and services.

Function runs an extensive panel, well over 100 biomarkers on the initial draw and another 60+ at a mid-year retest. These biomarkers cover categories most doctors simply don't order without a specific complaint prompting it: heavy metals, detailed cholesterol panels, inflammatory markers, micronutrient levels, and more. It costs roughly a dollar a day—meaningfully less than what equivalent testing would cost billed piecemeal through a lab, and without the unpredictability of billing it through insurance—and it doesn't require convincing a physician that you deserve to know this information about your own body.

As you may know, women's health has historically been underserved, underrepresented, and underappreciated. We have finally stopped whispering about this, and have started screaming it. But now what do we do? Function can play a part in this next phase.

The honest caveat

Here's the tension I want to name directly, because it's the single most common objection to this kind of testing, and it's a legitimate one: What do you actually do with the results? A number without context or a plan is just anxiety with a decimal point. This is precisely why testing like this works best paired with a knowledgeable professional, someone who can help you interpret an abnormal result, decide what warrants action versus monitoring, and avoid the trap of chasing every slightly out-of-range marker as an emergency. Function includes clinician notes with your results, which helps, but for anything genuinely abnormal—my mercury level is a good example—you still need a real conversation with your doctor about next steps.

The real benefits

• Access to a genuinely extensive panel most doctors won't order without a specific indication
• Early detection of things you'd otherwise only find by accident, or too late
• A shift toward proactive tracking over time rather than a single reactive snapshot when something's already wrong
• Meaningfully lower cost than piecing together the same tests independently
• Genuine agency over your own health data, without needing to justify the request to anyone

What’s worth considering

• Results without guidance can create anxiety rather than clarity
• Broad panels can occasionally flag markers with unclear clinical significance
• It doesn't replace your doctor or an actual diagnostic workup if something concerning shows up. This is why interpretation and guidance from a knowledgeable clinician matters
• Some add-on tests and advanced imaging carry significant additional cost beyond the base membership
• Depending on your location and whether you have access to a draw location, cost can vary slightly

Why I think this matters beyond me

Western medicine, as it's structured today, is overwhelmingly reactive. You go to a doctor when something is wrong, and the system is genuinely pretty good at treating that. It’s far less equipped, structurally and financially, to help you catch something before it becomes a diagnosis. Function gives you a real tool to shift your own posture from reactive to proactive, which is exactly the philosophy I've built this platform around.

I'm doing this testing myself (as are my young adult children), and I found something real because of it. And, just as importantly, because of this finding, I modified my behaviors. I ate much less fish and my mercury levels returned to normal. When that happened, my hair stopped falling out, so it was a great example of ‘look, find, change, look again, improve.’

Over the next two years, I'll be walking you through what I learn, what's worth retesting, how I’m responding to anything that’s out of range, and how I’m actually using the results—not just collecting, ignoring, or stressing over them.

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