myLAB Box offers two ways to get in touch with them: email and phone. In our experience, the customer representatives were fine to deal with, but they were short on answers to a number of our questions. They asked that we email those questions in instead. So we did, but we never got a response.
Instead, we called again a few days later and were mystified to hear the outgoing message recommend a live chat option on the website. We returned to the website and could not find a live chat option. Perhaps there was once such an option, and they hadn’t updated their phone message since they did away with it. Whatever the cause, we listened on, and no one was there to answer our call. There was no option to hold, but we could leave a message.
A few hours later, one of our testers got a call back from an unfamiliar Canadian number, but he screened it. Moments after that, a text came through from myLAB Box apologizing for having missed us.
Missing that call turned out to be something of a blessing, though, as the follow-up text opened a kind of live chat option through which we were able to have most of our questions answered. The answers came back slowly, but they came.
All of this is to say that the company has mechanisms to provide excellent customer care, but they’re too disjointed to be as effective as we would like.
Photo by Innerbody Research
Why you can trust us
At Innerbody Research, we extensively test each health service we review, including myLAB Box. All told, our team has spent over 168 hours testing and researching the products and services of myLAB Box and their chief competitors in order to provide an accurate, unbiased analysis of how the products and services compare, free of marketing jargon and gimmicks.
Over the past two decades, Innerbody Research has helped tens of millions of readers make more informed decisions to live healthier lifestyles. We evaluate the service based on adherence to quality, the latest medical evidence and health standards, and a simple question: would we buy the product or service ourselves if it weren’t part of our job, and would we recommend it to family and friends?
Additionally, like all health-related content on this website, this review was thoroughly vetted by one or more members of our Medical Review Board for accuracy.
What services does myLAB Box provide, and are they right for you?
When selecting a testing service and a specific kit from among a company’s offerings, you first need to decide which kits screen for the conditions that concern you. You should look at the quality and cost of lab tests, turn-around time for results, and data privacy.
myLAB Box’s specialty is providing discreet at-home health screenings that yield nothing in quality to the testing a physician would order from an in-house lab. This system caters to people who prefer to maintain a higher degree of privacy around sexual health in particular.
The company offers an ever-growing range of health screening options in various categories, including Sexual Health, Fertility and Family Planning, Wellness and Nutrition, Drug and Toxicology, and COVID-19/Flu. Because there is some overlap in these categories, certain kits will appear in more than one category on the company site.
There are limits, however. Insurance companies typically don’t cover tests from myLAB Box or their competitors, so if you need coverage to make a test affordable, you might want to go through your doctor. Also, if you have any issues with blood or are concerned that you’ll run into problems collecting your own sample, you may prefer to test in a lab.
Sexual health testing
Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) that are left untreated can lead to sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). These infections result from different classes of pathogens — viruses, bacteria, or protozoa — and result in health problems ranging from chronic discomfort to permanent sterility and acute, life-threatening illness. Sexual activity is not the only transmission route for many of these organisms; unprotected sex may account for most new infections, but some STIs can also be transmitted from mother to child during pregnancy or delivery or through needle-sharing among drug users.
One of the things that make STIs especially dangerous is that a large majority of infected people show mild symptoms or none at all — putting them at risk of disease complications down the road and increasing the chances they will infect someone else.
If you’re sexually active — regardless of age, gender, or absence of symptoms — you should be tested regularly, at least every year. Being responsible about regular testing is a life-saving habit because effective treatment for you and your partner(s) or your unborn child can depend on early detection.
