Like I explained in my Health Freedom Program, prevention & awareness are key when it comes to long term health.
From what myself, my family & my clients have experienced, doctors don’t usually want to run any bloodwork if symptoms are not present that correlate to said blood markers.
But wouldn’t it be great to know if you had cancer before it expressed outwardly & became a big problem?
Wouldn’t it be nice to track & understand cholesterol before it got too high?
Wouldn’t it be awesome to do something about a health issue when it’s in an acute stage vs. when it’s in a diagnostic stage?
That’s my mentality on the subject. I’d rather track my numbers over the whole length of my life & work preventatively on my health - so I can truly enjoy my life worry free, symptom free & catch anything serious years in advance.
Here a list of what your primary care practitioner will probably run at your yearly physical:
CBC w/ differential
Metabolic Panel
Lipid Panel
TSH ( & maybe T4 if you get lucky)
It’s rare that docs will order more unless some of the markers on those above panels are out of range… which takes more time & requires more blood draws.
At a minimum, I do recommend seeing your primary care doc once a year & getting some standard blood work done. Utilize your health insurance if you have it!
The Problem w/ standard lab ranges
Another problem with mainstream healthcare & standard testing is that the medical system is using very wide lab ranges. These lab ranges consist of the average of all the people that year that did the blood test. The sicker people get, the lower the “average” becomes. Average does not equal healthy. Isn’t it totally wild that their lab ranges are not based off of healthy people?! This info was a major wake up call to me.
I illustrate the lab ranges below.
What we need to do is use functional lab ranges to find what optimal for yourself is! When we see blood markers start to dip out of the optimal range & into the sub optimal ranges is when we can best do something about it. Waiting for your blood markers to get out of the lab ranges & into the alarm stages for a diagnosis is often times too late to do something holistic about the situation.
I’ve even seen clients blood work come back in the high alarm range & their doctor still says “everything is fine”. Has this happened to you as well?
As you can see from the example above, you can usually start to see some trending patterns before things get much worse & into a diagnostic state. A doctor would most likely not do anything for a score of 115, even though it’s technically high for this clients average over the past decade of time. A doctor would want her number to get above 140 (the technical lab range) before taking action. In my practice, a score of 115 would be outside the functional range & would warrant a deeper look into what the root cause may be.
This is the benefit of paying out of pocket for your labs & working with a professional to get your data into a functional analysis.
There is SO much to be extracted from your old labwork & looking for underlying patterns of dysfunction before they grow into a diagnosis.
Functional Analysis & Gathering More Data
The labwork I listed above that your doctor will typically do is just the beginning. My personal preference is to do a full comprehensive analysis (at least ONCE in your life but yearly is key to finding & knowing your personal optimal ranges). It includes all that I previously listed plus an iron panel, full thyroid panel, copper panel & more.
You can see my full list of markers that I consider a comprehenisve panel by clicking the button below. This is where you can also order your own bloodwork! Right now, this offer is only for those in the United States who have a Labcorp near them. You can search to see if you have a Labcorp near you by clicking here.
This comprehensive panel is what we call “extracellular bloodwork”. This type of bloodwork looks outside of the cells at what is currently inside your blood stream. This is technically a “snapshot in time” at what is going on inside your body.
There is also “intrcellular bloodwork” which looks insdie your cells at what is getting absorbed from the blood into the cells- which is where these nutrients go to do their job! There is a lot of nuance to the blood work analysis & I always recommend getting both extracellular & intracellular bloodwork for a full viewpoint as to what is happening inside your body.
If you want to learn more about functional lab testing & the blood work I mentioned here, I encourage you to watch my Health Freedom Blueprint video which explains it all in a bit more detail!