Today, blood work and science are able to provide more of a movie of your health, identifying trends before they become an issue.

It drives me crazy when people talk about the scale as an indicator of health, because your weight doesn't tell you what's going on at a biochemical level.

The art of phlebotomy originated with bloodletting in 1400 B.C., and the modern clinical lab emerged in the 1960s - and it has not fundamentally evolved since then. You go in, sit down, they put a tourniquet on your arm, stick you with a needle, take these tubes and tubes of blood.

The thing is to be able to outlast the trends.

Patients are empowered by having better access to their own health information, and then by owning their own data.

What worked yesterday doesn't always work today.