I have worked in healthcare for over a decade. In hospitals, on acute wards and on wards where people were living with long-term illnesses like cancer. I’ve worked In the community and all across England, Wales and Scotland. I’ve worked alongside doctors, nurses and pharmacists, with patients of every age, background and stage of illness.
In that time I have read more blood results than I can count. Thousands upon thousands of them. I have sat with people while we try to work out what’s wrong, I have sat with them at diagnosis, I have sat with them through years of treatment, and I have watched them die in front of me.
Every one of those encounters happened after the fact. By the time someone arrives on a ward, the years in which something was quietly going wrong in the background whilst nobody was looking, are already over.
Cancer has even been in my own family. Watching that happen is what pushed me out of treating illness and into the decade that leads up to it. That is the part I care about more now.
The NHS is for treating disease
This is not a criticism of the NHS. I work in it, and have done for a long time. It is one of the best things this country has, and if you are seriously ill it is one of the best places in the world to be.
But it is built to treat illness. It is not built to keep a well person well, or to help a healthy person get healthier. That is simply what it is for, not something it is failing at. Nobody is going to run your bloods every few months because you would like to know how things are going. There is no capacity for it, and it was never the job it was created for.
So if you want that, you have to go and get it yourself.
We have never been more advanced, or more unwell
We call it healthcare. A great deal of it is sickcare.
This is not a complaint. It is a description of what the system is built to do. We wait for something to go wrong, then treat it. And we can treat things extremely well. What the system does not do is watch how things unfold.
We are living through the most medically advanced period in human history. Better drugs than any generation before us, better surgery, better imaging, better intensive care, better treatment than seemed possible even twenty years ago. And we have never been more unwell. That is the part I find hard to get past. Rates of almost everything that kills people slowly are going the wrong way. And they aren’t slowing down.
We have become really good at the end of the story but we are barely looking at the beginning of it.
It all starts in the decade before anything goes wrong. While the numbers are still moving quietly and nobody is watching them. That is the part you can do something about.
A blood test is a snapshot
Blood is not the only way to understand your health, and it is certainly not the whole picture. But it is the cheapest and fastest way to look at multiple systems at once and get an idea of how you are doing. Your hormones, thyroid, liver, kidneys, iron, lipids, inflammation, blood cells, all from a single sample, with no scan, no referral and no waiting list.
We can change things every day but we never truly know if they are moving the needle. Your blood is the measurement.
But it also has a real limitation, and we tell you what other companies never would. A blood test is a snapshot. One reading, one morning, one set of circumstances: what you ate, how you trained, how you slept, whether you were ill last week. A single result tells you about one day and nothing about a trend.
That is not an argument against testing. It is an argument against testing once.
One test a year is far better than none. And four tests a year is far better than one. Which is why we price our tests to be repeated rather than as a one time event.
You are an experiment of one
Healthcare is standardised. You are not.
A reference range describes a population average, roughly 95% of it, and that population is not a particularly healthy one. It tells you whether you look like everybody else. It does not tell you whether you are where you were last year, whether the thing you changed three months ago did anything, or whether you are slowly drifting in one direction.
This is the part I understand better than most, and it is not a slogan. My PhD research was in molecular pharmacology, which is the study of why the same drug, at the same dose, does different things in different people. The answer is never that one of them is broken. It is receptor density, enzyme variants, transporters, binding proteins, and whatever else happens to be in the system that day. Two people are not two copies of an average with a bit of noise on top. They are two different systems.
I then spent a decade watching that play out in real people’s blood results. The same number meaning two entirely different things in two people on the same ward. A result sitting comfortably inside the range that mattered enormously, because of where it had come from. A result outside it that meant nothing at all.
An n of 1 is a study with a single participant. In most of science that is the weakest evidence there is. In the body it is the only honest description of what is happening. You are not a population. You are one.
That is why we are called N1 Health. Your uniqueness is the whole argument, and everything else follows from it.
It is why a single result read against a population range might be the least useful way to use a blood test. It is why we say the only comparison that means anything is your own: you, against you, under the same conditions, over time. And it is why the Body Guide and the Biomarker Guide exist at all, because you cannot read your own numbers against yourself until you understand what they are actually measuring.
Everything else is a rough guide to whether you resemble a group of strangers.
The market is a mess
There is more health information available now than at any point in history and a great deal of it is wrong. This space in particular is full of people selling certainty they do not have, and protocols or comments that exist to sell more products.
Testing is no different. Bloated panels stuffed with markers you did not ask for and cannot use. Prices several times the underlying laboratory cost. Some companies advertise hundreds of tests and present that as a strength. It is not. One of the biggest complaints I hear is how people are sick and tired of spending hours comparing which test to buy. It leaves you comparing tens or even hundreds of products that differ by a single marker, and you either buy the most expensive one to be safe or you buy nothing at all and maybe your health suffers. Choice is not the same as help.
And nobody, anywhere, is willing to tell you what a test actually cannot do.
The information around the testing is worse than the testing. We live in a world today that is full of information. Unfortunately, that also means we live in a world full of misinformation. Maybe not wrong in an obvious, dangerous way. But wrong in the quiet way that is much harder to spot. An optimal range quoted with total confidence and nothing behind it. An optimal number from somebody else's protocol, handed to you as though it were yours. A reference range treated as a target when it is a description of a population. A supplement protocol built on a number that nobody has ever set a target for.
Not everyone selling that is a cynic. Plenty of them believe it. That does not make it true, and it does not help you, because none of it was written about you.
I got tired of it. That is the honest answer to why this exists.
Choosing a test goes through the specific patterns in detail, with what to ask before you buy anything. It applies to any seller, including us.
So I give it away
Here is the thing I keep coming back to.
Almost everything in the previous list of problems works because of an information gap. Bloated panels work because you cannot tell which markers are useful. Five hundred tests work because you cannot tell them apart. Invented optimal ranges work because you have no way to check where the number came from. Every single one of them depends on you not knowing.
So close the gap.
Everything I know about this is written down on this site, in full, and it is completely free. Two guides. The Body Guide covers every system in the body: what it does, why a blood profile groups the markers it does, and what changes when it comes under strain. The Biomarker Guide covers every marker we run, one at a time: what it measures, what moves the number, and where that number came from — including when the honest answer is that nobody has published one at all.
Between them it runs to tens of thousands of words. There is no paywall, no account needed, no email signup and no upsell at the bottom of it.
Nobody else gives this away. I do not think that is because nobody else could. I think it is because nobody else cares enough to. It takes a very long time, it is genuinely difficult to get right, and it can make some of your own products look less necessary. Which is exactly what happened to me more than once, while I was writing it.
I do not care about that. Good health is the most important thing any of us has, and not only for our own sake. But for the people who depend on us, and for the people we want to stick around for. Something that important should not sit behind a purchase.
My own experience has made this easy to see. I have spent a decade reading these numbers in the situations where they matter most, and I know exactly how much difference it makes to understand them early rather than late. That is worth more than the margin on a test.
So if you read all of it and buy your test somewhere else, that is a good outcome. If you read all of it and decide not to test at all, that is also a good outcome. I would much rather you could tell a good test from a bad one anywhere you go than have you buy a bad one from me. One of my goals has always been to help educate people in order for them to take control of their own health.
Everything you need. Nothing you don't.
That is the part I care most about.
We give you direct access to an accredited medical laboratory, and we let you decide exactly what goes in the test. Start with a profile or a panel, then add exactly the markers you want. Nothing is bundled in to inflate the price, and nothing you need is deliberately held back to sell you a higher tier.
The number of tests stays small. The number of markers you can add does not. We will never sell a hundred tests. That is intentional.
A new profile is added only where there is a real gap. TRT Monitor Complete exists because it adds thyroid function, kidney function, HbA1c and inflammation to TRT Monitor, and keeps every marker the cheaper one already had. That is a genuine step up. Ten versions of the same test, separated by one marker each, is not.
How it works covers the process end to end.
Your results, exactly as the lab reports them
What arrives is the lab's own report, with their own reference ranges, and nothing added to it.
If you want your results interpreted, you should take them to your GP or to a clinician who knows you. But the Body Guide and the Biomarker Guide will help you to understand the human body and the biomarkers you can test for in order to ask better questions and take control of your health.
The parts that cost us sales
Every seller has things they would rather you did not notice. Here are ours.
We sell finger-prick testing on every test where we think the result can be trusted, and we publish the failure rates for it, which nobody likes to do. One of our profiles reports one fewer marker on a finger-prick sample, and we say so on the product page rather than in the small print. The whole picture is here.
The Body Guide and Biomarker Guide go considerably further, because once you start writing this down honestly there is nowhere to stop.
The heart section opens by saying that nothing we sell measures your heart. The adrenal section tells anyone who is tired that the cortisol test is unlikely to tell them why, and names the markers with a better claim. The muscle section states that routine creatine kinase monitoring on a statin is not recommended and we sell creatine kinase. The kidney section names the urine test that completes the picture and we state plainly that we do not sell it. The hormone sections say the free androgen index is of limited value in men. Potassium is not on the menu at all, and there is a full entry explaining why not.
None of that is there to look humble. It is there because it is true, and because a company unwilling to tell you the limits of its own product has already told you something about itself.
It is never too late
One last thing, because it is the objection I hear most.
People decide they have left it too long. They are carrying too much weight, or they are sixty-five, or the last ten years did not go the way they wanted, and somewhere along the line they concluded the window has closed.
It has not. There is no age and no starting point at which measuring stops being useful, or at which changing stops being possible. The body responds to what you do to it for as long as you are alive. Starting at seventy with a difficult set of numbers is not a worse position than starting at thirty with good ones. It is a different one, and the direction of travel from here is the part you control.
We owe it to ourselves to find out where we actually stand and to do something with the answer. And we owe it to our loved ones.
Start with the guides. The Body Guide for how the systems work. The Biomarker Guide for what each number means. Read them, take what you need, and then decide whether you want to test at all.
Dr Abir Awan PhD
Founder, N1 Health
Specialist Haematology Pharmacist
Doctorate in Molecular Pharmacology
Independent Prescriber