A New Era of At-Home Testing Means Everyone’s a Doctor—Especially Hypochondriacs
The age of self-optimization is at hand.
Illustration: Virginia Gabrielli
My kitchen table looks more like a medical lab than a place to eat dinner. It’s scattered with blood spot cards, lancets, specimen tubes, swabs and collection paper from all the self-test kits I’m mailing in to monitor my well-being. But this is the new era of at-home health.
In the past five years, there’s been an avalanche of at-home test products, keyed by our pandemic-driven obsession with health and newfound comfort with self-administered testing. People now rely on the convenience and privacy of diagnosing at home, according to a survey by RR Donnelley & Sons, a Fortune 500 company that specializes in supply chain solutions. As a whole, the market for consumer-initiated lab testing is expected to be worth more than $2 billion by 2025, according to Quest Diagnostics.