I heard True Health Diagnostics is going out of business. Is that true? If so, who are you planning to use for advanced cardiac and metabolic diagnostics?

Sadly, that is true. They filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy a while back, but they said they were going to be reorganizing, getting new funding, and that they were going to survive. Then I was hearing some rumors through the grapevine that maybe that wasn’t the case, and sure enough, we got a letter, I don’t know, maybe three weeks ago, saying, “That’s it; we’re closing our doors.” It’s a bummer because they had some unique testing that’s not available elsewhere like LDL [low-density lipoprotein] electrophoresis for LDL particle [LDL-P] number, which is much more accurate than NMR [nuclear magnetic resonance]. NMR tends to overestimate particle count, but it’s the best we have without True Health Diagnostics being in business, and we’re switching over for advanced cardiometabolic stuff to Boston Heart [Diagnostics], and we’re in the process of putting together a panel with them. If you contact them, you could ask for the CCFM, California Center for Functional Medicine Panel, which we’re still working on, so maybe wait a month or something. That’s a good option. And then, LabCorp certainly has some of the markers you can do in NMR, which will get you LDL-P, HDL-P [high-density lipoprotein particle], all of those lipid markers. You can add Lp-PLA2 [lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A2] and lipoprotein(a). You can [use] myeloperoxidase and fibrinogen and some of the inflammatory markers that you got from True Health Diagnostics. You can do genetics. The advantage with LabCorp is that patients’ insurance will often cover it, which was not always true with True Health Diagnostics. They had some, let’s just say, interesting billing practices, which is perhaps part of why they ended up going bankrupt. But you can kind of cobble it together with LabCorp, although it’s not as comprehensive of a panel, and when you start adding individual markers rather than having it be part of a panel as it was with True Health Diagnostics, the cost can really add up, so that’s one disadvantage.

Boston Heart is pretty expensive, too, but they, I think, do a much better job with insurance coverage. They can usually tell you as the practitioner or the patient whether insurance will cover [it] before you run the test. That then gives the patient the option of whether they want to do cash pay or just try LabCorp and maybe get insurance coverage that way. We really work with our patients to try to help them get coverage, and we’re totally willing to switch to a different lab if we can get the same markers and they can get better insurance coverage that way.