1 Video, Many Reasons: Test Your Thyroid This Month

January 29th, 2010   Add Comment

It is almost the end of Thyroid Awareness Month, so we have a video to wrap up the reasons to test your thyroid for you.  It’s only 1:45 long so it’s well worth the look!  Brought to you by icyou.com and the Medical University of South Carolina:

The take-away quote for us? Well, there are two. “[The thyroid hormone] is required by every tissue, every cell, every organ to function properly” and “Thyroid disease is extremely common, especially in women.”  ”27 million Americans have some type of thyroid disease and about half don’t know it.”  We had to include that one too.

So if after this video you are curious about finding out your level of thyroid hormone, know that you can do so conveniently with a home thyroid test.  Ours features accurate results from a CLIA certified laboratory that uses the same processes as any standard reference laboratory in the country.  The kit comes with well-written instructions on how to take your own blood sample and the results are mailed to you by the lab in the form of a report.  You can then share that report with a health provider and figure out what to do next.  It’s a quick and easy way to find out if you are one of the 13 million Americans who does not know they have a thyroid disorder.

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Know the Facts – Home HIV Test With the FDA’s Seal of Approval

January 29th, 2010   Add Comment

HIV Testing is an important thing, for the individual and society as a whole.  Why say this?  Because of this sobering finding for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention on HIV awareness:

Early diagnosis of HIV infection can delay progression to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and reduce transmission of HIV to others. Nonetheless, in 2006, an estimated 232,700 persons, 21% of those living with HIV infection in the United States, were not aware of their HIV infection status.

There are many options available, including any of our home AIDS tests.  But there is one thing you should definitely be aware of…

Make sure your test is FDA APPROVED!!!

We say this because there are other tests available online, some using saliva instead of blood, that are marketed as home HIV tests.  But these tests are not FDA Approved.  When you are looking for a test as important as an HIV test, it is necessary to know that the FDA has approved it and that you are in good hands.  Home Health Testing ONLY sells FDA Approved home HIV kits.  All of our AIDS tests come with telephone support for your results questions too.

So keep that in mind – make sure your test is FDA Approved!  Home Health Testing makes sure that all of our products in the Home HIV test category certainly are.

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Drug Testing the Center of Debate in Kansas

January 27th, 2010   Add Comment

Republican lawmakers in Kansas have come up with a proposal to screen welfare recipients for drug use.  There are a few proposals on the table, and they are not exactly new.  The Kansas House of Representatives passed a similar bill last year but the Senate of the state did not.  The lawmakers in charge of reviving such proposals are in the Senate.

One proposal would require drug testing all welfare recipients – around 44,000 people.  Another bill suggests people would only be tested if there was “reasonable cause” to believe they were using drugs.

It is perhaps a controversial issue, and the Springfield News Leader presents various perspectives in their article.  Do you agree that it would help people get jobs?  Is it an effective way of improving the quality of life among those on welfare?

A home drug test, administered by yourself or someone close to you, can be an effective way of ending drug abuse.  But is what is done at home necessarily appropriate on a federal scale?

There are lots of questions about drug testing, but no question that when used correctly it can even save lives – in situations like catching someone who has stumbled back into addiction with a hair drug test, or finding that someone is high on the job with a saliva drug test.  And these are just a few examples.

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Are You Keeping Your Resolution? How to Quit Smoking

January 21st, 2010   Add Comment

Everyone knows that smoking is extremely harmful for one’s health and the government has done a lot to create awareness of the various problems that smoking can cause. The issue is not with creating awareness about the negative effects of smoking but actually quitting. The New Year is an excellent time to see how this is true because there are thousands of smokers who resolve to quit smoking only to find that they are itching to hold a cigarette in their hands after a few hours of the resolution. A nicotine test, among other methods, is a great way to give up the habit for good.

If you try and ask advice of smokers who have successfully quit smoking for good, you shall find that there are as many suggestions as smokers. While you can review each one of these methods, you will have to check out the one that works best for you. Make sure that you continuously use tobacco testing at home so that you can be aware of the presence of nicotine in your body. Awareness of the pervasiveness of nicotine in your body with these nicotine tests may actually shake you out of your inertia.

Such testing can be done at home very easily. All that you need is a small sample of urine. The tobacco test checks out the level of cotinine in the urine. This is a by-product of nicotine that is processed in your body and excreted through the urine. This is why the nicotine test is also called the cotinine test at times.

Some of the methods that you can adopt to quit smoking have been listed below. These can be used as standalone options or in combination to ensure that you are able to successfully quit the habit. While you work with these methods, use the tobacco test as well.

- Just quit – Some people believe that a slow reduction in the number of cigarettes is not an option but that a cold turkey method should be adopted.

- Reduction over time – This is a method that can help if you have specific times when you reach out for a cigarette and want to slowly eliminate those rituals as days pass. Use a nicotine test when you finally have not smoked for a few days. This can be a great motivator because you can see how your body is actually getting cleansed – you will see after 2 to 4 days that you actually test negative for nicotine!

- Quit with a friend – This is another method that works because it creates a sense of competition and/or cooperation.

There are other methods like nicotine patches, nicotine chewing gums, nicotine lozenges and nicotine inhalers that you can use. Whichever choice you make, everyone wishes you the best of luck in quitting smoking!  As a company that specializes in the home drug test, we know of a lot of drugs out there, and nicotine certainly is hard to quit!  That’s why we have a test designed along those lines to help you with that legal but addictive substance.

- Anne Hamilton

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Why Can’t Hair Drug Tests Be Cheated? Find Out Here…

January 21st, 2010   Add Comment

Home Health Testing strives to provide the most information about the tests we sell and what they test for.  On our main site we took a look at why hair drug tests can’t be cheated (you can read the full article at the link).  Basically we want everyone to know that our hair drug tests test what’s inside the hair – what you can’t get to with advertised shampoos and conditioners.  Sometimes the problem with drug tests is not that they aren’t accurate (they are) but that they can be faked.  With urine drug testing, people spike samples (or try to anyway) all the time.  It’s silly, but there you go.  Urine tests are certainly worth it for the range of drugs they can test (up to 12 at one time!), their value (the cheapest of all tests), and their decent detection time (a link to our chart).  Saliva drug testing is also a useful tool, because someone can take the test standing in front of you – it doesn’t have the same privacy issues as a urine-based test.

So don’t be daunted by all the “pass a drug test” sites that are out there!  Check out our article on hair follicle testing and learn more!

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Why You Should Alcohol Test Your Employees

January 20th, 2010   Add Comment

It has been estimated that about 70 percent of substance abusers hold jobs. This includes the 18 million alcohol abusers that have been estimated in the United States. Coming to work under the influence of alcohol can cause various concerns and issues. Among them are risks of an accident, reduced productivity, higher levels of health insurance costs and therefore lesser profits and unsafe conditions for everyone.

An alcohol test can help in finding out those who have been abusing alcohol or have come to work under the influence. It has been seen that alcohol abusers like other substance users are more prone to miss work and are also at a much higher risk of being involved in a job accident. This risk obviously is far greater in jobs that require extremely high levels of concentration.

Workplaces that require physical work like driving or managing large equipment, in other words any work that requires the reflexes to be at their best, can benefit from on-site alcohol testing. Since alcohol consumption causes blurred vision and coordination issues, these tasks become difficult for those under the influence. Transportation companies, construction companies, factories, heavy equipment handling companies and others should definitely include alcohol testing as a regular practice to ensure job safety.

Not only are alcohol tests necessary for the job safety of the employees, they also keep the employers away from complicated law suits that tend to follow incidents. It may not be practical to have a laboratory come in and conduct testing every now and then, but the breath analyzer alcohol test is an extremely convenient and accurate one that can get around this problem and literally be used every day.

Educational institutions are also using the alcohol test to ensure that there are no students that come to the campus under the influence of alcohol. This is a necessary measure that is being taken to ensure that proper discipline is maintained in the premises of the school. Hooliganism and unacceptable behavior can be avoided by using the 0.02 percent breath alcohol test.  As a matter of fact, the University of Minnesota, for example, requires season-ticket holding students guilty of previous alcohol offenses to take an alcohol test before they enter the stadium (see the full article at the blog Alcohol Testing).

Small businesses that cannot afford to hire a laboratory for these alcohol tests on a regular basis can ensure that their workplace is devoid of alcoholics. While those with desk jobs may not be at such a high risk of accidents on the job, the short term effects of alcohol can lead to low productivity and bad judgment. Alcohol induced fatigue, insomnia and lack of judgment and false confidence can cause some really wrong decisions to be made.

The home alcohol test is also something that educational institutions and corporate offices can use to ensure that the employees are clean and not under the influence of alcohol when they report. These alcohol tests are simple and can give results in a matter of seconds.

The 0.02 percent breath analyzer is a great piece of zero-tolerance equipment that can detect alcohol that has been consumed in the past hours. It is also a convenient thing to use to decide whether it is safe to drive or not rather than calculating the number and type of drinks consumed before getting behind the wheel.

Such alcohol tests not only provide a great way to pick out alcohol abuse at the workplace, they are a significant help in deterring teenagers from indulging in alcohol too.

- Anne Hamilton

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