Wellness with Vanda
A women's health podcast where we'll be talking about hormones, mindset, motherhood, & everything in between. The host, Vanda, is a functional medicine nurse coach that helps women overcome hormone imbalance so that they can achieve optimal wellness. In her private practice she specializes in HTMA testing and DUTCH testing. Throughout this podcast she shares tips for boosting energy naturally, improve mood, recover from mom burnout, ways to increase fertility, ways to improve sleep quality, tips for pregnancy, tips for navigating postpartum and the fourth trimester, and more!
Wellness with Vanda
37: Friday Question #4: Why are my labs always normal when I feel terrible?
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Hey guys, I'm back for another Friday question and again I've just come in from a walk. I've got Cade still strapped to me. He's taking a nap right now. Can't promise that he'll make it through this without contributing to the conversation. Hopefully we can get through it without me having to stop and start over before it's time for him to eat again.
Speaker 1:Anyway, so our question that we are answering this week I love this question. It says why do my lab results always come back normal, even though I feel terrible? And this is a really common question. This is a really common thing that happens and there's a few different reasons for it. I wish there had been just a little bit more context to this question, like which labs are we talking about specifically? Are we talking about thyroid labs? Are we talking about female sex hormone labs that maybe your OBGYN has ordered? Are we talking about, like, yearly lab work in general, because it kind of depends on what it is that you're getting tested. But I'm going to answer this in general. So, because there's a few different reasons, the number one reason that you know you go to your provider and you express concern about these symptoms that you're having and they're like okay, let's check some lab work, see what's going on, and they call you the next day or whatever, and they're like everything looks normal, you're good to go and you're left feeling like, well, what the heck? That didn't get me any answers. If I'm all good and everything is normal, then why do I feel?
Speaker 1:The way that normal ranges are figured and developed and decided on what they're going to be is taking into consideration a large amount of the population and, as we know, we're not all healthy, especially here in America. So they are taking sick people or people that have chronic diseases, sometimes even unknowingly, like things maybe that haven't been diagnosed yet, and they are lumping them into this group of people that they are determining these averages from. So one way that you can kind of prevent this or work around this is to have your lab results compared to optimal ranges. Now, this is not something that your traditional provider is going to be able to do. You might be able to do a little digging around the internet and find some optimal ranges. You can work with someone like myself that's a functional provider that looks at blood labs and has an optimal range chart or something that they go off of from their training of what is considered to be optimal versus just normal, and that can give you some insights.
Speaker 1:What I do when I do a blood labs review for someone is I look at the labs, I compare them to the optimal ranges and we see what's outside of range. And then we look at those labs that are outside of the optimal range and it's like what are we really testing with this lab? What can this lab tell us if it's outside the range? What can it be indicating? And then you kind of look at the lab results as a whole to see what themes you're finding. So maybe it's pointing towards there's a lot of inflammation in the body, maybe it points towards blood sugar dysregulation, maybe it points towards a gut health issue. And you can kind of go from there to develop like whatever your next steps are going to be, or what changes to a protocol, or maybe you're starting a protocol supplements, diet, lifestyle changes, things like that that need to happen.
Speaker 1:The other reason that this might be happening to you specifically with, like sex hormone testing, the labs might not be taken at the right time of the month or the that's not the right way to say that at the right time of your cycle. So this actually happened to me years ago, before I was ever like trained in all of this stuff. It was when my period had went missing. I kind of insisted that my OBGYN order some testing to get my hormone levels tested and he wrote the prescription, the order for me and sent me on to the lab. Well, at no point did anyone explain to me that there are specific points in your cycle that you need to get your estrogen checked, your progesterone checked. Some of the other things it doesn't matter so much, like testosterone, can pretty much be tested anytime. But specifically estrogen and progesterone need to be tested at a specific time in your cycle because they fluctuate throughout your cycle and there's a peak time for estrogen in your cycle and a peak time for progesterone.
Speaker 1:And it's important to know when you're getting the labs done, where you are in your cycle, so that you can compare those, because what's normal for the first half of your cycle might not be normal for the second half of your cycle and a lot of times that is like looked over or missed or just not discussed and so those labs are not taken at the right time. Third thing is when you get blood work done your body, the results you're only capturing what that specific level is at the specific time that your labs were drawn. So, for example, with like potassium, you're only capturing what that potassium level was specifically when you got your blood drawn. And this is why I like to use HTMA testing for a lot of my clients, because, although the blood work is very valuable, I find that for answers to symptoms, why something's been happening long term or why it's been happening for the past several weeks or several months it's more valuable to be able to see the three month overview, the three-month average, of what that level has been through HTMA testing. It just gives you more information and I can't get into all of the details of this, I'm just going to very briefly explain this. But our body has to tightly regulate our blood levels to keep us safe and alive, and so that's why you know you're not, you're going to see changes in blood labs way later than you'll see it in. Like a hair tissue mineral analysis test, an HTMA test, and you're testing two completely different things. And you're testing two completely different things. When you're getting an HTMA test done, you're looking at what's inside the cell. When you're looking at blood, it's outside the cell. So that also makes a big difference. So I hope that helps. I hope that that gives you some answers.
Speaker 1:I do have a resource to go along with this Like. I'll link it for you where you can just kind of like click and get it. It's a list of the labs that I would recommend everybody to get yearly. There are some detailed explanations on there for people like what I would recommend for people that think that they have thyroid issues, what sex hormone testing I would recommend if you're having X, y and Z symptom. There's also some information in the email that you'll get when you sign up to get this about how you could order labs for yourself if you needed to, if you didn't have a provider that was willing to do that, and then also some information for you about my blood labs review and how that works and all that good stuff. So I will have that linked for you. I hope that this is super helpful. Please keep submitting your questions for these Friday questions. I love doing these and I hope that they are helpful to you and that you're learning a lot through these. I will talk to you guys next week.
