Home health tests are far from new. Think about it – women have been doing pregnancy tests in the comfort of their own homes for 50 years. Many of us have also done at-home tests for COVID. Here’s what you may not know – the variety of medical tests you can do at home is growing. These days you can test for quite a few conditions. You can do urine tests, finger pricks, nasal swabs, and more. Let’s take a look.
Hormone Imbalances
Did you know that women can simply prick their fingers to check their hormones? A hormonal imbalance test measures critical hormones that can affect things like your energy level and weight. The tests measure things like TSH, testosterone, and cortisol, among other things. However, these three hormones, in particular, play quite a massive role in terms of metabolism.
COVID
You may have heard of the COVID tests you can do at home being referred to as rapid tests. These look for the presence of specific antigens that are produced by your immune system as a response to the virus responsible for COVID-19. The tests that you get when you go to your doctor’s office, in contrast, look for genetic material produced by the virus. The at-home tests are looking for a current infection and aren’t able to let you know if you’ve had the virus in the past.
UTI
If you’re experiencing a burning pain when you urinate coupled with an increase in the urge to go, you might just be suffering from a urinary tract infection, or UTI. These days, it’s simple to utilize an at-home UTI test to see if this is the case. This test is a simple strip you place in a sample of your urine. It checks for specific substances that tend to be present when people have a UTI, like white blood cells and germs. If you suspect you have this type of infection and use one of these tests, you can have your results as quickly as two minutes after testing.
Colon Cancer
Colon cancer is when the cells in the rectum or large intestine become abnormal. It’s recommended you’re screened routinely beginning when you turn 45. However, your physician may recommend you begin this earlier if you have a personal history of certain kinds of abnormal growths or cancer, a history of inflammatory bowel disease, colon cancer runs in your family, or if you’ve received radiation treatments to your pelvic area or stomach.
There are two different tests for this. One of the tests for colon cancer is given by the doctor. This is a visual screening. The other type can be done at your home, and this one is a stool sample. You can either get this from your doctor or over the counter at your local pharmacy. You mail the sample to a certified lab and can have the results as quickly as a few days.
Many of the at-home medical tests that are available are easy to use and convenient. You have no need to carve out a chunk of time so that you can drive over to your doctor’s office. For quite a few tests, you only need to wait a few minutes to get the results. Other tests will come with a prepaid mailing label so you can send your samples off to a lab. If you get this kind of test, you’ll typically get your results in about a week. Regardless of the type you get, you can skip an annoying and time-consuming trip to the doctor and do your own test in the comfort of your own home.
