That frustrating 'all-OK' from the doctor...

The annual check-up at the doctors is great. Some blood is drawn, and a few short weeks later, along comes the cheery ‘all-OK - you’re looking great for your age!’

Blood is our river of life. We can tell a great deal about what’s going on in the body, and we use blood to identify lots about what’s going on functionally in a client’s body. But what I want to discuss in this post, is the difference between the blood work typically run by your doctor, and the type of blood work you need to run if your goal is optimal health.

Your primary healthcare physician’s job is to scan you for all sorts of diseases, and keep you out of hospital. They are not typically in a position to run the blood tests needed to achieve optimal health, nor would they have the time to guide you to achieve it. That’s not throwing shade at doctors. It’s being realistic about the number of patients they help on a daily basis, and acknowledging the work national health services do in keeping people alive.

The general state of health in society is such that doctors only have the time and resources to run the tests required to rule out serious disease. If we are largely OK, but would like to get to the underlying causes of our health niggles, we need to assess the body from a functional perspective.

It’s very common to get the ‘all-clear’ from a doctor, but we know deep down that something’s just not right. It’s incredibly frustrating when that problem is eczema, and it’s clear to see on the skin, but we’re being told that all is well.

Functional lab testing takes a far more holistic approach to assessing the body, and is not aimed at ‘searching for disease’. It is designed to assess your body’s vital signs against what would make for optimal function. It is not a disease-avoidance model, but rather a true healthcare model.

Standard lab reference ranges on conventional tests take the entire population into consideration. That includes young thriving adults, cancer survivors, stressed out CEOs and old-age pensioners. So if your blood values come back ‘within range’, all you’ve really determined is that you’re somewhere in the mix, and likely free of chronic degenerative disease.

Here’s a set of blood test values a client sent in that were given the ‘all-OK’ from the doctor. I’ve assessed the values supplied against the much-narrower functional reference ranges we use, to demonstrate how many opportunities for improvement this client actually has.

This client felt that something wasn’t working quite right and a functional perspective on the case is enough to confirm this suspicion - without even running any further lab tests. Those elevated white blood cells (the neutrophils, monocytes and basophils) give us a clue that the gut / immune system isn’t settled. The elevated TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) and HbA1C (diabetes indicator) are definitely markers we want to look further into.

We will now be looking into the hormones, immune function, digestion and detoxification systems in the body to identify further opportunities for healing.