Food intolerance testing - Why use venous blood?

Food intolerance screening is done with blood, so blood sampling is essential for testing, and two methods are widely used.

One method is to get a few drops of blood by pricking your fingertip. The advantage of this is that it can be done at home, without the help of an assistant, but the disadvantage is that the small amount of blood taken may not be enough for the test, and the small amount of whole blood is more sensitive to transport - so it is easy for the blood sample to fail in the laboratory and the blood sample has to be taken again.

If you are planning to have a food intolerance test, it is worth considering whether you need any other laboratory tests, as you can take the blood for it with a single prick.

Another type of blood sampling is the venous blood sampling used exclusively in Endomedix centres. In this case, our expert medical staff obtains a few tiny tubes of blood by puncturing the veins, which is then centrifuged to produce purified plasma and sent to the laboratory. This type of blood collection provides more reliable results, because the blood volume is guaranteed to be sufficient and the blood obtained is less sensitive to transport and processing. In addition, two tubes of blood are always taken to be on the safe side, so if an unexpected event occurs during processing or transport, we still have a reserve of blood and do not have to call the patient back in.

I also think it's important to note one more thing: although at first glance it may seem that fingertip blood collection is a much less invasive procedure, I personally find the pricking of a fingertip with a lot of nerves much more painful than an expert venous blood draw - the latter is really just a "mosquito bite".