When you visit your primary care physician to address symptoms like fatigue, weight gain, headaches, or digestive issues, they’ll likely order lab tests to measure key health factors like glucose levels, lipids, electrolytes, and some hormonal markers. If something is off, you’ll probably be given a prescription and sent on your way. If the numbers look “normal”, you might be told your symptoms are “just stress” or “nothing to worry about”.
Knowing and feeling that something is wrong and having your concerns dismissed by your doctor can be incredibly frustrating. Unfortunately, it’s also very common. Most primary care physicians have huge patient loads and only spend about 10-15 minutes with each patient. So, relying on common lab tests is standard practice for diagnosing illnesses. But you don’t have to settle for this limited approach to managing your health. Functional medicine can reveal the factors that conventional medicine is missing.
Why Labs May Miss the Bigger Picture
While standard lab reports can raise a flag for some health issues, they leave a lot to be desired when it comes to accurately diagnosing illnesses and taking a proactive approach to managing your health. Here’s why:
- Normal Ranges Are Simply Statistics – Normal lab results are based on statistics. In other words, normal ranges are set based on the averages of an entire population, not the ranges where you will feel and function your best. They also don’t account for context, such as the time of day the test was given, the medications and supplements you use, and your fasting status.
- A Single Lab Test Misses Ongoing Trends – Getting a single blood test can miss trends in your health. For example, your body may have a steady rise in thyroid-stimulating hormone that’s missed because your results are on the higher end of the reference range, and you only had a single test, which provides only a brief snapshot of your health on a single day.
- Women’s Physiology Isn’t Always Considered – Medical research and healthcare have a systemic gender bias, which means that women’s symptoms are often dismissed and misinterpreted—or worse, they’re ignored completely. In addition, normal ranges for women can vary throughout their lifetimes. Pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, and menopause will shift baselines and significantly increase certain health risks that often go unaddressed in traditional medical settings.
- Standard Labs Are Limited in What They Test – It’s helpful to think of standard labs as a surface level look at what’s going on with your body. For example, thyroid function is typically only measured through TSH levels, but TSH may be normal while T3 and T4 levels or thyroid antibodies are not. Additionally, hemoglobin may be normal, but an iron deficiency could still be hiding due to low ferritin, or stored iron in the body.
How Functional Medicine Goes Deeper
Functional medicine is a whole-body approach to medicine, and it implements a broader range of assessments to create a fuller picture of your health, along with a detailed roadmap for optimizing your health and boosting your longevity.
- Assessing the Root Cause of Illnesses – The goal with functional medicine isn’t to constantly chase and treat symptoms. Instead, it is to prevent and reverse illnesses by addressing their root causes. Strategies like gut testing, expanded thyroid panels, detailed symptom diaries, and nutritional testing can reveal issues like systemic inflammation, nutritional deficiencies, or hormonal imbalances that have been missed with previous lab tests and are causing a wide range of your ongoing symptoms.
- Understanding the Mind-Body Connection – Functional medicine practitioners like Dr. Jordanna Quinn and our Nutritionist Kirstin Newton at Kore Regenerative Medicine will take the time to understand your daily routines, stress levels, and feelings, as these factors have a significant impact on your health. Due to the mind-body connection, you may experience a wide range of physical symptoms due to negative emotions like grief or anger. The nervous, immune, and endocrine systems are constantly communicating in the body, so it’s beneficial to approach your care holistically to keep all systems in balance and promote a positive mental state that in turn boosts your physical health.
- Optimizing Your Nutrition and Wellness – Simply taking medications to resolve different symptoms does not change your overall health and wellness. That’s why lifestyle medicine—which focuses on optimizing sleep, movement, nutrition, and recovery—is integral to our approach.
If you have “normal” labs but still feel off, trust your intuition and seek a more comprehensive, whole-body approach at Kore Regenerative Medicine. Kore’s longevity approach goes deeper to address the root cause of your symptoms. Schedule your discovery call today to learn how we can help you take control of your health.
