Blood work

Kryptopyrrole! now there is a name to conjure with. Kryptopyrrole is an endogenous cause of psychosis, a schizogen... widely thought to be extinct, like phlogiston and Caloric.

Commercial success with second album

It is not the name of a black-metal band who started out as Arts-School prog-rockers "The Mauve Factor" but changed their direction after their first album, Malvaria. So imagine our poorly-controlled glee to find it among the schedule of tests on offer from Health Diagnostics and Research Institute;

it is like finding Dr McCoy at the door, waving his tricorder to check one's bloodstream for Polywater.

"What are you on about?" asked the desk-lamp.

"Hush," I whispered, "You know what the Frau Doktorin is like when I talk to the furniture... she frets, and hides the Special Spiced Akvavit. I am investigating the credibility of laboratories where one might send blood samples to have them tested for Nagalase activity."

Let HDRI explain the need for a Nagalase test:

Alas, on perusing the reputation-burnishing, gravitas-building "Publications From our Laboratory" section at the HDRI website, it proves to be a compendium of Alt-Health newsletters and vanity-press mockademic journals, which appear in the manner of quantum-vacuum fluctuations only to vanish when the people behind them move on to some other scam. Director Audhya is especially proud of his collaboration with widely-despised anti-vaccine grifters David and Mark Geier (Geier der Ältere has been delicensed from practicing in an impressive number of states for prescribing chemical castration as a cure for autism; Geier der Jüngere has been spared that discredit for he never bothered to acquire a medical degree in the first place).

No newcomer, Dr Audhya, he is an OG crank... he also co-authored McGinnis' "Mauve Factor" monographs. Let us nope our way out of there as fast as we can nope.
How about the European Laboratory of Nutrients, of which the HDRI is an affiliate / acquisition? The ELN also boasts of its Nagalase-testing prowess.

Journal is no longer extant

Medical Director Emar Vogelaar... now there's another evocative name. Vogelaar contrives to combine the barmy beliefs of orthomolecular psychiatry with the even barmier intellectual scholium of Steiner Anthroposophy. He has argued that Steinerian and homeopathic treatments are cheap; so by performing and billing for tests for those treatments, he was saving money for the insurance companies and the medical system, even if they had not requested them. The court was not convinced at his fraud / forgery / money-laundering trial and imposed a €1.6 million fine.

"I cannot read the HDRI rationale for Nagalase testing," squeaked the swivel chair, "for I am only furniture, and therefore short-sighted."

"It's a marker for cancer!" I explained.* "And autism! And it's in vaccines, and the chemtrails, and children's icecream!"


Moving right along... an informant at Jerome Lamb's blog apprises us of another possibility -- Nordic Labs, in Copenhagen, upstairs from the Amber Shop and the Shanghai Chinese Restaurant:

Well, this doubt about Mary Jewell and her husband started about a month ago when she offered to order a test called Nagalase test, to test his levels in his body. It's a cancer marker test. There are only 3 labs in the world that do it and it's a 5 week waiting time to get the results. She said she could get it done in a couple weeks. She would order the test from this lab (Nordic Labs) and they would send us a test kit and we have our doctors here arrange for the blood sample to be prepared and sent off to the lab.

The unprepossessing ground floor access to Nordic Labs need not deter us for they are not a laboratory per se, but rather a middle-man, a one-stop shop. To relieve you of the burden of researching all the options and deciding which to laboratory to trust, they forward your samples to anonymous recipients and then place your results on-line.

Closer scrutiny reveals that when they are not competing with [or outsourcing to] Doctors Data for the heavy-metal hair-analysis market, Nordic Labs cater to a "Chronic Lyme Disease" clientele of Munchausen hypochondriacs...**

Chris Moore, Managing Director of Nordic Laboratories, ascertained very quickly that of the 100 or so patients in the room, only around one-fifth had actually received a positive [Lyme] laboratory test.

...as DNALife, they have a side-line in the gene-personalised-diet grift, offering TRANSLATIONAL NUTRIGENOMICS^TM courses and selling on-line diplomas...

...their Nagalase information page is plagiarised verbatim from the one at HDRI and ELN...

...despite the Scandiwegian affectations of austere efficiency and rectitude, DNAlife.eu and Nordiclabs.com are both front ends for Simply Nature Ltd., an alt-health supplements-&-vitamins pill-mill in Sussex.

None of this matters if the customers are satisfied.

So we pay for the kit, and it never comes. Three weeks later I write to the lab and ask where it is, and they tell me they needed an additional 70 euros for shipping. The price we paid, $121 euros, was supposed to take care of the shipping and test, so we couldn't understand why now they wanted more money. I wrote them back and reiterated that to them and they said they had communicated this to Amanda Mary Jewel ( our "health" practitioner). Well, she never told us, so it made us wonder where that extra 70 euros was going to. I cancelled the test and asked for a refund, which we are still waiting for.

"Perhaps I should drop into the Old Entomologist and see if the vile Throgmorton is there," I said; "he may have a cheap testing kit that fell off the back of an ambulance."

"That is an excellent notion," agreed the swivel chair and the articulated desk lamp.

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AFTERTHOUGHT: Back from the pub now. Lesson learned: Avoid beer with black bats printed on the label.
The present list of Nagalase testers is not comprehensive. Trevor Banks provides a useful albeit cruftily-coded list at one of his GcMAF-promotion sites. For instance, there is RED Labs in Belgium, primarily serving ME/CFS patients, but their reports are hedged around with caveats and scrupulous attempts to control for confounders. Thus we mention them mainly as an excuse to use the "Bloody Belgiums" tag; and to marvel at the amount of time that Banks spent on ME/CFS support boards, in the guise of a fellow sufferer, pimping the therapeutic value of GcMAF.

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* According to Dr Yamamoto anyway. Yamamoto, instigator of the whole GcMAF / Nagalase drama and a disgraced fraud, had a series of papers retracted due to the absence of evidence that their Ethics Review panels existed... with co-authors being equally untraceable, and indeed the experimental subjects.

** Not recognised for reimbursement by BUPA.