Ep. 59 - When Your Doctor Says Your Labs are “Normal” (But You Still Feel Sick) - with Jennifer Savage

Jennifer Savage holds a doctorate in the field of Traditional Naturopathy and promotes client-centered health strategies with a focus on cellular function. She also works as a Functional Medicine Consultant teaching doctors, holistic practitioners, and health coaches the concepts, methods, and principles of functional medicine application within their practice.   As a Functional Health Practitioner, Jennifer utilizes functional lab testing to understand her client’s current state of dysfunction and to then present healing opportunities for her clients – and today, she’s going to explain what some of the functional labs available to you are and what they can tell you about your health.   Because sometimes you go to the doctor and you know something isn’t right, but they tell you that your pathological/conventional labs are “normal” and nothing is wrong – and you should always feel empowered to advocate for your own health, and functional medicine practitioners like Jennifer can help you do that.   Before we get into it, though, I want to note that lab work is always a single set of information from a single point in time. It's never going to give us a complete picture of everything that's happening in the body. It's just a few clues.   Two Viewpoints Conventional medicine uses lab testing for diagnosis and disease. Functional medicine, on the other hand, uses lab testing to view areas of imbalance that can be supported.   For example, what is the difference between a Functional Blood Chemistry Analysis and a Pathological Blood Analysis (“regular” blood test)? The pathological range is used to diagnose disease. The functional range is used to assess risk for disease before the disease develops.   That seems pretty good, so why don't most health care providers embrace the functional range?   A lot of health care providers think that care should be provided when disease is present. This view is generally formed from conventional medical training, which often ignores the philosophies of preventative medicine and nutrition.   So let’s talk about one of the most common and powerful functional medicine labs: blood chemistry testing.   Blood chemistry testing measures chemicals including enzymes, electrolytes, fats (also called lipids), hormones, sugars, proteins, vitamins and minerals, and these values are recorded as levels in the body   Now, let’s dig in a little deeper.   What are reference ranges?   Standard blood work shows values of tested elements in our bodies that fit within a reference range, and each lab that analyzes blood work has their own range   Where do they get their ranges?   The reference ranges are calculated so that they encompass 95% of apparently healthy people.   However, a greater amount of sick people need to have blood drawn than healthy people, so that skews the ranges a little bit. Not only that, sick people may get blood tests done and receive results that are normal, thus determining that sick person to be “healthy” and adding their data to the 95% of apparently healthy people.   That’s part of the reason why functional medicine practitioners look for an optimum range for a...