THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY

A few weekends ago I attended a three day seminar that I believe every professional health care practitioner should attend. It was another seminar based in Functional Medicine where we identify small health problems (functional) before they become large health problems (pathological). The first step in this process is blood work. While many already know that I look at blood work with a different perspective from most other doctors, this seminar gave me an even deeper understanding on how to identify functional problems before they become pathological. For those that don’t know already, I provide a free introduction to Northland Applied Kinesiology which includes an assessment using applied kinesiology and reading the patient’s most current blood work. It takes about 20-30 minutes depending on the amount of questions and can be scheduled any time. That’s the good news.

I have also been notified by the two major supplement companies that I use (Thorne Research and Apex Energetics) that they have or will be raising their prices. With this, I too will have to raise my prices on supplements. From what they have told me their increase will be 2-7%, therefore mine will follow that same trend. I will increase the supplement prices on September 1, 2012. That’s the bad.

With the excitement of the new information from the weekend seminar also comes some information that is frustrating, mystifying, and almost ridiculous. As I have told many patients, there are no set laboratory ranges that the entire United States uses to assess health vs disease. The lab where you get your blood drawn uses a bell curve to produce their “healthy/normal” ranges. The problem with this technique is that most people who are getting blood work done are sick. So we are basing our “healthy/normal” ranges off of sick people. But that’s not the ugly part. The ugly part is that it can change from region to region. For example, in one area of the south uses blood glucose ranges up to 135. The American Diabetes Association says that the top of the range should only be 130. So people in this area could be diabetic and have what is considered “normal/healthy” blood glucose. The take home message from this is that when you are told your results came back “fine/normal/within the ranges” you are just as sick as the rest of the population. Congratulations! This is the ugly. If you want to be better and healthier, use the free introduction to Northland Applied Kinesiology and get your blood work read using Functional Medicine, you might be amazed at what I find.