Has your doctor told you “you’re fine” even though you don’t feel fine?
Have you always had the sneaking suspicion that something is still off, and you need more testing or different testing to find out?
Just like many of my patients who have experienced the same thing… you are probably right!!
The conventional approach to testing for illness usually relies on very basic blood tests. While blood testing is important, doctors typically run the most basic blood test sanctioned by standard protocol. And these tests really don’t give us much usable information. On top of this, the “normal range” isn’t necessarily a “healthy range” because it’s just an average of people’s health stats- healthy or not.
So you can see that conventional tests like a CBC and Metabolic Panel are just that… basic.
In the case of GI issues there is a similar equivalent called a “scope” which really only gives basic information about structure and not much information about function.
Question:
Did you know that when symptoms become chronic and your standard tests like blood tests or scopes come back fine, it’s a sign that you need more advanced testing to find out which system is out of whack? Type “yes” below if you suspected this…
So this is the key thing… chronic symptoms usually mean something “systemic” is off, such as your gut health, hormonal issues or problems with inflammation.
This is where Functional Medicine testing is far superior because it gives us so much in-depth information – not only can we look at the whole symphony of your hormones from stress hormones to sleep hormones on top of the sex hormones that some docs will test only if they deem necessary, we can find out what is out of whack with the hormonal cascade.
In the case of inflammation we can do advanced gut testing- to see if a gut infection or dysbiosis is causing wide-spread inflammation. We can also see if you have undiagnosed food allergies, parasites, bacterial infections, and any number of things that scopes don’t pick up.
That’s why the Functional Medicine approach is so much more informative than the conventional medicine approach.
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Thanks for watching. This is Dr. Wanda Bedinghaus, functional medicine doctor.
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