Please Show Me Your Bloods!
It’s now a common story to be feeling a little (or a lot!) off, maybe you’re experiencing some fatigue, or some brain fog and poor concentration, or irregular periods, so you go to the GP or a conventional medical professional to get some routine bloods done in search of some answers.
But most of the time, they say that the blood work is all good, that “everything’s normal” and they send you on your merry way.
I cannot stress how important it is to get your results looked over by a naturopath or nutritionist! Why?
The answer is that conventional medicine uses laboratory’s statistical reference ranges that can differ greatly from what naturopaths compare your results to, which are referred to as “functional” or “optimal” ranges. Lab reference ranges are too wide to be of any real value, and are designed to pick up on disease. They are based on statistical averages of people that have been to that lab, (usually over the past year), so your results are being compared to people who are probably sick to begin with! And this also means that ranges can vary from lab to lab.
Functional ranges are based on healthy populations of people, and give narrower windows of results, in between which is an “optimal” level of a certain vitamin or biomarker in the body. These can pick up on the risk of a disease developing, before it develops. We don’t just want our Vitamin D, for example, to be just enough to avoid deficiency and the symptoms and illnesses that come along with deficient levels, we want it to be at an optimal range for the body to have all of its wonderful effects like immune support, happy mood & bone health.
Naturopathic ranges can check for “subclinical” levels which is where the person will be experiencing certain symptoms (e.g weight gain & fatigue from a subclinical hypothyroid condition) however may not be at a severe enough stage to be presenting at a level that will give a full-blown diagnosis or warrant specific medical intervention such as prescription for medication.
Naturopaths also analyse blood pathology tests to look for organ function and dysfunction, to get a deeper understanding of the inner workings of the body. For example, when we look at reproductive hormones, these can also tell us about stress your body might be under or what’s going on in your diet, so we aim to look at your bloods very holistically and not in a vacuum.
Usually, if your results fall outside of a conventional medicine’s reference ranges, not only are you not feeling as good as you could be, but you are likely quite severely deficient.
For example, ferritin refers to iron storage in the body and is the best marker for iron status. A naturopath would say ferritin needs to be between 50-150, whereas conventional medicine would say anything between 30 (sometimes as low as 15!) up to 200 is fine.
Please email your results over to me prior to your appointment. If you don’t have any pathology complete, I will talk you through what to get tested and when during your initial appointment.
By Phoebe Ackland, BHSc Naturopath