Superpower Health is a subscription based health service that includes annual blood laboratory analysis and personalized health recommendations.

Superpower Health approached me for a trial of their service, in exchange for a review. As an aging athlete, I had often heard about services like this but generally would rely on my health provider for annual blood work and health recommendations.

The Superpower Health offer presented a unique opportunity, as I was also due for my annual physical. The question? How would Superpower Health perform against my physician in terms of recommended lab work, health recommendations, and follow-up guidance?

Now to get personal - the about me. It’s impossible to dig into a review of a personalized health program without level setting who I am. I’m a 50 year old female competitive athlete who is struggling HARD with perimenopause. I’ve been dealing with tendonitis, fatigue, aches and pains. I have well documented health records (aka years of bloodwork data) and a female athlete focused healthcare team. I have a high deductible health insurance plan that covers a single annual visit with a medical practitioner and annual labs.

Getting set up with Superpower Health was pretty easy. You set up an account and fill out a pretty detailed questionnaire. This intake data helps their system recommend lab work that’s beyond the basic $200/year package and helps to feed into their recommendations once the lab work is in. It also prefers to have access to your health tracker device, in my case Garmin, to look at historic trends in HRV and recovery as well as your activity level.

Once that’s done, you schedule your blood draw. You can schedule a visit at any in-person Quest lab or (for an additional charge) have someone come to you for the blood draw.

Once the lab data is in, you get the raw data and a personalized health report, with their recommendations on medication and supplements. It should be noted that this service cannot write prescriptions; they can only flag items that require a prescription for follow up with your provider.

For this review, I wanted to really see how the Superpower Health service stacked up against my human physician. I scheduled a blood draw with Quest (via Superpower) and my routine annual lab blood draw within 1.5 hours of each other on the same day. Both blood draws were fasted. My physician prefers Lab Corp for their testing service. Superpower Health analyzed 106 biomarkers, focusing on 12 core health systems. The specific tests requested by Superpower Health were:
367 - Cortisol, Total [SERUM]
402 - DHEA Sulfate, Immunoassay [SERUM]
482 - Gamma Glutamyl Transferase (GGT) [SERUM]
905 - Uric Acid [SERUM]
4021 - Estradiol [SERUM]
5224 - Apolipoprotein B [SERUM]
5616 - Iron, TIBC and Ferritin Panel [SERUM]
6399 - CBC (includes Differential and Platelets) [BLOOD]
7286 - Bilirubin, Fractionated [SERUM]
7444 - Thyroid Panel with TSH [SERUM]
10124 - hs-CRP [SERUM]
10231 - Comprehensive Metabolic Panel [SERUM]
14966 - Testosterone, Free, Bioavailable and Total, MS [SERUM]
16802 - Hemoglobin A1c with eAG [BLOOD]
17306 - Vitamin D, 25-Hydroxy, Total, Immunoassay [SERUM]
19543 - Lipid Panel with Ratios [SERUM]

I asked my physician to run similar tests (their preferred lab was Quest) so my review would be an apples-to-apples comparison.

Once the lab work was finalized by the lab, I received laboratory results as well as Superpower Health’s insights and recommendations. The Superpower Health report is available via their app (website or phone app) and the information is viewable a few different ways. You get a detailed report (“Health Protocol”) that was 19 pages long (for my results). It captures your top headline concerns (for me that was inflammation, immunity/tendon recovery and daily health foundation) and dives into detail based on those concerns in the subsequent pages.

The report is organized by biomarker groups, presenting your tabular data against “normal ranges” and a discussion of what the data means. The information is written in a way that’s easy for the non-medical person to understand. The report also discusses why these results are important to your overall health, what possible causes are for out of range items, and recommended actions. Recommended actions are largely for supplements with (as appropriate) calls to action to see a medical provider for additional testing or prescription care.

You can also review your lab results on their app (phone or web) and drill down into core health systems and review your lab results so they’re organized by system. These systems are also graded (A-F) and color coded (green, yellow, pink) so you can easily review biomarkers and systems that require support. For every lab result, you can click into “Ask Superpower AI” to gain insight about why that biomarker is important, how you can improve things, or form your own question.

Your “protocol” (or actional items based on Superpower’s review of your lab data) mainly directed me into purchasing supplements via their portal. Members get 20% off supplements purchased through the Superpower portal. I did a side-by-side comparison of their supplement pricing versus Fullscript (where I typically get my supplements). Superpower’s pricing generally aligns with what I observed in Fullscript, which is nice. Also nice is that auto-subscriptions save an additional 5%, making your supplement purchase 25% lower than other retailers.

Free shipping is only offered with purchases over $150, so group your purchases together to save on shipping. Superpower doesn’t stock a wide range of brands (Designs for Health, IM8, Microbiome Labs, Pedrome Science, Pure Encapsulations, Quicksilver Scientific, Thorne), so you may have a hard time finding a like-for-like substitution if you want to move all of your supplements over to their service.

The Superpower AI has been interesting to use. I’ve been peppering it with questions, feedback from my medical provider, and providing additional context to the results that it’s given me. Sometimes the advice or recommendations from the Superpower AI is spot on and other times, it’s a big miss. The big misses are when the AI makes giant assumptions because it doesn’t have my personal history (or ask refinement questions).

Superpower also provides weekly insights (via email or the app). These insights are largely their AI putting together trends from my Garmin recovery data and attempting to draw conclusions. The issue is that the trends do not take anything else into context (illness, vacations, etc). I’ve been in solid off-season mode for the past month with a few vacations mixed in. I know that the trends are impacted by my trips (mainly drinking beer and/or being at high elevation), but the Superpower AI has zero way of knowing any of my non-Garmin recorded activities, which leads to some fairly useless insights.

Closing Thoughts

My membership was for a $200 annual plan, which consisted of a single blood draw (their basic panel), an evaluation of that data with recommendations, and a year of “unlimited concierge support”.

The basic laboratory panel was very comprehensive. The evaluation of my results was easy to understand and their recommendations were easy to follow. Where it gets murky is where the recommendations require prescriptions or a medical provider - Superpower just isn’t able to provide that level of care.

The concierge support is via the Superpower AI driven feedback and members have the ability to ping their AI with questions and get their recommendations. I personally haven’t found it to be all that helpful and I have had to spend a fair amount of time training their AI to be relevant to me and my medical history and lifestyle.

Bottom line: I’ve found Superpower to be a good first step or low-barrier way to get a comprehensive bloodwork check and evaluation. It’s all done remotely (except the blood draw part) and you can schedule everything to fit into your life. Superpower does not replace actual medical care. Even as a fairly healthy (but older) athlete, I’ve found that there are gaps in their recommendations (or irrelevant assumptions that require correction). It has not replaced meeting with my medical provider and getting their recommendations or subsequent follow-up visits.

I think Superpower is a good option for those who don’t have a medical provider - or prefer to minimize interactions with medical providers. It’s appropriately priced and has a low barrier for access. It could also be a good option for those with high deductible health plans who are looking to supplement their medical provider care with routine bloodwork at a reasonable price.