As a pathologist, some of what you’ve said conflicts with how things are in medicine.

You don’t test positive for lead poisoning through something like this. For incremental heavy metal poisoning the effects take years to decades to onset, but even then its difficult to directly attribute medical complications to it because its something that patients won’t mention when they’re giving a history because they don’t know most of the time. There is testing for trace metals but it’s expensive and rarely done from the get go for a multitude of reasons. The cdc no longer recommends testing for it unless there’s indicators that you’re at risk of it.

The immediate short term effects are soo vague that things are rarely attributed to lead poisoning, and the longer it goes on the more it becomes the baseline norm, so patients then have never lived a life different so they don’t understand that they should have more energy, less stomach aches and headaches, memory loss, reduced appetite, constipation, etc.

Eventually what happens, and we know this happens because there are long term cases and studies that prove this happens, is that people start having bigger issues like heart disease, high blood pressure, kidney disease, infertility, etc. All things that are usually more likely to be caused by something else. Again, unless there’s some indicator.. which there rarely is for cases like this.. they go through what it’s more likely to be instead. So doctors will treat these symptoms often assuming they have no direct cause (like how blood pressure is exacerbated by things but really can present in anyone) but these symptoms may continue in these situations and only get worse over time, eventually you increase your risk for cancers and heart failure, kidney failure, severe mental issues, etc. By the time the big ones come up they’ll definitely figure it out then.. but at what cost.

If you do have lead exposure chances are, eventually when you get sick.. it’s probably been heavily caused by lead poisoning to the point you probably otherwise would not have been sick.

You are correct in the sense that it could could have been a negligible amount of lead, every case is different. But what we do know is that the effects of lead poisoning are very often missed and they are difficult to trace back the longer time passes. We do know that lead poisoning causes generational health complications if there are kids involved. We do know that wherever possible, the best practice is to avoid lead exposure wherever possible.