A recent NYT piece on Function Health caught my eye. The company charges $365/year for access to 160+ lab tests, far beyond what most doctors would order for a healthy person. Their tagline: "Ignored by most. Tested by us."
The reader comments were revealing. One commenter defended the service:
Some doctors won't test for things that later turn out to be a real problem. Many insurance companies will deny coverage for tests they think are "excessive" (and let's be honest—insurance companies do not exclusively base those denials on what is good medicine). And doctors do—sometimes often—miss real and serious diseases. And are sometimes biased against certain classes of patients (unless they've been unusually lucky, any older women can speak plainly to the experiences of having symptoms dismissed that would have been taken seriously & called for tests were they male. Double this if they are obese. This has been studied and shown to be a problem).
People's bodies belong to themselves. There is no reason not to allow them to have access to ordering (and paying for) tests for themselves if they want to. They still can't get Rx meds without a doctor agreeing to it, presumably after seeing test results or running their own tests, so why would you deny human beings access to important information about their bodies and health?
Another, a retired family doc, saw it very differently:
Retired family doc here. This quackery is both a consequence and a cause of the primary care physician shortage.
Medical students avoid primary care like the plague because it is a lousy job. Then people can't get in to see doctors, so they are liable to fall prey to quacks.
Primary care physicians then have to try to clean up the mess that the quacks make, which makes medical students even less likely to want to go into primary care.
We are in a vicious cycle, folks. I am not optimistic that we will get out of it.
The only good news here is personal: I am retired and no longer have to deal with this stuff.
They're both right. And that's the problem.
The Pipeline Nobody's Talking About
Here's what I see happening: Function and companies like it aren't just selling tests. They're the entry point to an entire alternative medicine ecosystem.
The article profiles a woman whose Function results showed elevated ANA (an autoimmune marker). The thing is, up to 15% of healthy people test positive for ANA. Without symptoms suggesting autoimmune disease, it's unclear what that result even means. But it led her to a functional medicine practitioner, a 90-day elimination diet, and a daily regimen of nine supplements taken four times a day plus hormone therapy.
Some of her markers improved. Her liver enzymes got worse.
This is the testing-to-supplements pipeline in action. First, cast doubt on whether mainstream medicine is testing enough. Then surface concerning-looking results. Then recommend "natural" interventions.
The Trust Problem Cuts Both Ways
I wrote recently about how restricting access to medications that actually work (statins, ACE inhibitors, metformin) has created a vacuum that the $50+ billion supplement industry has filled. Americans have a DIY spirit. When we put up barriers to evidence-based treatments, people don't wait patiently. They find alternatives.
But here's the uncomfortable corollary: if you mistrust your doctor enough to believe they're missing diagnoses and not ordering tests they should, why would you trust their treatment recommendations? The logic flows naturally toward alternative medicine, alternative testing platforms, alternative treatments.
Function's co-founder is Dr. Mark Hyman, a prominent figure in functional medicine who's close with RFK Jr. The company says it's "not to be confused with functional medicine." But several patients in the article described Function as their gateway to that world.
The Real Risks
To be clear, there are legitimate grievances with American healthcare. Primary care appointments are too short. Insurance does deny reasonable tests. Bias against women, older patients, and obese patients is well-documented.
But the solution isn't more testing. It's better testing.
Here's the thing about lab tests that most people don't realize: what counts as "normal" is defined by statistics, not by some absolute measure of health. When a lab sets its reference range, it typically takes results from a large population of healthy people and draws the boundaries at the 2.5th and 97.5th percentiles. By definition, 5% of perfectly healthy people will fall outside the "normal" range on any given test.
Run one test, and you have a 95% chance of a normal result. Run 160 tests on a healthy person, and the math gets ugly fast. You're virtually guaranteed to have multiple "abnormal" results that mean nothing at all. Some people are naturally on the high end of certain markers; others run low. That's not pathology—it's human variation. But when you see a red flag next to your results, it doesn't feel like variation. It feels like something's wrong.
This is why doctors order tests based on symptoms and clinical context—not because we're gatekeeping information, but because testing without reason surfaces noise that looks like signal.
And the supplements recommended to "fix" those abnormalities have even less quality assurance than prescription medications. The supplement industry is largely unregulated. Contamination, mislabeling, and liver toxicity are real risks.
Meanwhile, the boring interventions get overlooked. Is your A1c creeping up? Has it been checked in two years? That's not glamorous, but it's vastly higher yield than an ANA test in someone with no autoimmune symptoms.
What Responsible Direct-to-Consumer Health Looks Like
I'm building a health AI company, so I've thought about this a lot. The temptation is real. Silicon Valley loves companies that charge premium prices for premium-feeling services. Extensive testing and personalized supplement protocols feel premium.
But I don't want to hawk things people don't need. There's a version of "consumer health empowerment" that's really just a new way to monetize anxiety.
What if instead we helped people identify the one or two labs that are actually overdue? What if we helped them understand what their existing results mean? What if we helped them navigate to evidence-based treatments, even if that means a generic statin instead of a proprietary supplement stack?
That's not a $365/year proposition. But it might actually improve health outcomes.
The Real Opportunity
The irony is that the problems Function is responding to are real. People do feel ignored by the healthcare system. Access to primary care is genuinely difficult. The system is reactive rather than proactive.
But the answer isn't to replace one set of gatekeepers with another. It's to give people tools to navigate the system we have, while advocating for policy changes (like Rx-to-OTC reclassification) that make evidence-based care more accessible.
The DIY spirit in American healthcare is here to stay. The question is whether we channel it toward interventions that work.
References
[1] Kolata G. "Function Health Promises Comprehensive Blood Tests. Is It Worth It?" The New York Times. January 8, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/well/function-health-blood-tests.html