Somewhere in medical history we elevated hemoglobin alone as the single representative of iron deficiency.

This is probably the case for a few reasons, from social to economic to outright political:

1. 1. 1. A lot of people are iron deficient. Strained medical resources usually mean there isn’t a will to devote attention to problems most people face because there’s simply too many of you.

          

      2. Triage mentality is that if the problem isn’t going to kill you, we tend to wait til it’s about to because there’s other people with more important concerns to take care of.  We don’t operate in a preventative medical system, which means people who are on their way to having extremes of treatable conditions are often overlooked. We have a tendency to wait too long to help fix people’s health problems.

          

      3. Sexism in medicine? You don’t say.  Iron deficiency is overwhelmingly a female health concern. And like many other female health concerns, we don’t pay it the justice it deserves.

          

      4. Medical education hasn’t kept up to date with the research in the field of iron deficiency and many doctors don’t believe there are consequences to iron deficiency without anemia.

          

      5. Lab reports don’t highlight iron (ferritin) numbers til they are very low, which reinforces the minimizing of iron deficiency as a continuum of both symptoms and lab results.