Live and dry blood analysis has been around for close to a hundred years.
It really began in the early 1900s with scientists like Dr Günther Enderlein, a German microbiologist who studied blood using a special technique called dark field microscopy. What he discovered was that there are tiny, shape-shifting microorganisms in our blood, and that their behaviour seemed to reflect the overall health of the internal environment of the body. That was quite groundbreaking at the time.
Another key figure, Dr Claude Bernard, actually introduced the idea even earlier, that it’s not just the germs we’re exposed to, but the condition of our internal terrain that determines whether we get sick. And that’s a concept that still holds true in holistic health today.
Now if we fast forward to the mid-1900s, researchers like Dr Robert Bradford and Dr Harold Manner in the US began applying live blood microscopy in the context of biological and natural medicine. Around this time, dry blood analysis, which involves looking at how blood clots and dries on a slide, also started gaining ground. Research, especially at places like the Bradford Institute, showed that patterns in these dried blood samples reflected issues like oxidative stress, toxicity, and organ stress.
An important pioneer of modern LBA is Prof Marcel Bessis, a French haematologist who lectured at the University of Paris in the 1960s and 70s. He wrote a number of books describing the value of evaluating blood in a living, un-changed and non-stained state. He argued that all haematology labs should change from analysing stained blood samples to live samples, mainly because with live samples you’re able to “observe the dynamic life processes at the cellular level unfold in real time.” “You can capture events and sequences that are impossible to see in static, dead, stained slides.”
This makes so much sense if you think about it. It seems logical that you would get more information from a fresh sample that has not been altered in any way, than from one where the cells have been frozen in time by chemical stains.
Since Prof Bessis there have been other researchers who have continued to connect the dots between what we see in the blood and the client’s state of health, the physiological processes involved, and ultimately, to the interventions that are consistently successful in correcting a specific anomaly.
At its core, what makes live and dry blood analysis so valuable is that it gives us a real-time window into what’s going on inside the body, especially at a cellular level. We can often see signs of imbalance long before symptoms show up or before anything might appear in standard laboratory tests. It’s a brilliant tool for understanding a client on a deeper level, which allows you to formulate better, more appropriate treatment protocols, and to monitor the effectiveness of treatment
It’s also incredibly empowering for clients, when they can actually see what’s happening in their own blood, it makes the healing process real, and it often motivates change in a way that other tests or words alone can’t.