Clinical Laboratory Testing from A Healthy Healing Perspective
The Healthy Healing perspective is the functional or integrative medicine perspective.
When you go to go and see a doctor, especially one of internal medicine, tests are to be done. And among the first ones on the list appear the different varieties of laboratory reference ranges of the client’s blood chemistry – the ‘blood tests’. Apart from other means for assessing the overall state of health of the client, to the amazement of some we also use them at Healthy Healing, and frequently so. They are quite helpful, but not in the same way as they are read and interpreted by physicians ordinarily.
Conventional laboratory ranges are designed to identify and diagnose disease states and pathology. People who fall within the reference range are assumed to have no clinical signs and symptoms of any disease, and are considered normal; people who don’t are considered ill. It is as simple as that, or is it?
From our functional medicine therapeutic approach, we don’t agree, as, what we are mostly interested in finding out is not to name a disease, but to understand what is going on in the body, overall. We want understand how the body functions, in general. In other words, by looking for optimum function we increase our ability to detect dysfunctions that plague our patients long before actual disease manifests. Our conventional lab testing becomes more comprehensive by being prognostic and preventative, as well as pathology oriented. The functional approach to modern medicine, after all, is always more inclusive than the conventional reductionist approach.
Therefore, the aim in using common clinical laboratory testing is in turning it into a diagnostic method that focuses on physiological functioning as a marker of health rather than merely the presence of pathology or tissue change, as a marker of disease. This enables us to help your body help itself in ridding itself of a looming dysfunction before it ever arises. Or once a person has fallen ill, it enables us to support the body's self healing capacity, rather than merely proceeding by suppressing the symptoms.
