Have You Ever Been Told Your Labs are Normal?
Ever felt any of these…..
-You wake up and you're immediately already exhausted.
-You find yourself more short tempered with your kiddos.
-You don’t feel like yourself, but you can’t seem to figure out why.
-You find yourself more stressed or anxious than normal.
-Your mind seems to be racing a million miles a minute at night when it is time to go to sleep even though you are exhausted.
-You feel immediately bloated after whatever you eat, healthy or not.
At some point, I have felt every single one of these.
All of these are common reasons that we reach out to our doctor and ask for testing. We tell them that we don’t feel normal and something must be wrong. Some will agree to testing and others will give you the answer of “its just perimenopause” or “it's just the season of motherhood you are in”, but the truth is if you don’t feel normal, IT IS NOT NORMAL.
I found myself postpartum in my doctor's office asking for help. I asked her to run labs as I was struggling with an irregular cycle, exhaustion, breakouts, and anxiety. She agreed to run some hormone panels after first asking me to consider going back on birth control for my cycle. I am anti birth control for the purpose of synthetic hormones. I am pro anything and everything natural as that is how our body was designed to thrive. If I went straight to taking birth control, it would essentially create a fake cycle. It would be a band aid and avoid getting to the real issue of why my cycle was not regulated. After I said no to that she requested that I do estrogen patches to protect my bone density while my cycle was not regulated. She never once asked about my workout routine to see if I was potentially over exercising or encouraging lack of bone density loss by strength training. I immediately asked if I could have a few months to try and get all my numbers into “range” before synthetically putting anything into my body. My doctor was not happy, but let it go. With my test results, most numbers were within range. She sent me an email from the online portal with the results and basically said “here is a nutritionist contact info if you want it.” And that was that. Truly solved nothing.
This happens all too often as patients are dismissed for symptoms that exist due to a bigger issue. They will give you medication for those symptoms without ever thinking about what the root cause may be (resulting in that medication just being a band-aid that can potentially just cause more side effects and issues). A lot of this has to do with lab reference ranges. When doctors order testing it is to be diagnostic in nature as they are looking to treat and diagnose. Lab reference ranges are extremely large. This is due to it incorporating all types of people healthy, non-healthy, and all the outliers. But is this truly our reference range? Our reference range should be healthy people only as that is what we are all aiming to be. Because these lab ranges are so large, if someone is out of range it is very obvious to a physician that an issue exists and intervention needs to happen (usually a medication). With FDN ranges, we only incorporate healthy individuals and our ranges are much smaller so that we can truly see what normal or abnormal looks like.
From someone who made holistic lifestyle and diet changes to heal all of the things that I went to my doctor about previously I want you to know it is possible. I didn’t need the birth control, or synthetic hormones, or even the nutritionist that you would see one time and maybe again in a month. I needed to give my body the support it needed, naturally.
Lab results are designed to give insight into your body, but they are not the defining factor. It takes looking at your test results and also looking at all your symptoms, lifestyle, and medical history to gain a true understanding of what is at play. For all of you who have been told your numbers are normal and you don’t feel normal, I hate that you have not felt seen. I felt the exact same way. You know your body best and don’t settle for anything less than that.