If chemicals like oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin are so crucial to our mental health, why can’t we monitor them the same way diabetics monitor insulin?
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A couple big problems:
1) there isn’t a quick and easy blood test for that.
2) insulin has a pretty clear safe/ideal range, or rather its corollary in blood sugar does. They…don’t. Our understanding of the full interactions of these and other neurotransmitters is rudimentary where present at all. Even if we could test for it we couldn’t reliably create a sort of green/yellow/red matrix for what each should be at any given moment.
3) they are extremely difficult to reliably modify. With insulin it’s a single variable with the fairly direct solution of providing a fairly predictable amount of insulin replacement according to weight and current level. We don’t have an easily injectible seratonin replacement with predictable outcomes like that. Same for any other neurotransmitter.
So…we can’t *easily* measure them. We can’t easily identify what they should be even if we could measure them and we can’t easily alter the state even if we could measure it and reliably determine a target value
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