Does Blood Work Really Tell You What Is Wrong?

Does Blood Work Really Tell You All That Much?

Does your blood work really tell you everything that is wrong?  Can it identify and pinpoint complex nutritional and hormonal problems?  Well…..maybe but more often than not, the way the blood is being interpreted is marginal, leading to improper prescriptions of nutritional and pharmaceutical products that the body has no idea how to use. There are a lot of doctors that rely solely on blood to identify problems, including nutritional issues. Entire companies have been created just to run specialized labs designed to identify exactly what each individual is lacking and how to fix the problem. Yet, by my perspective, they have all fallen short because many fail to understand why values might vary and all the possible scenarios that can produce dramatic blood levels.

First, it is essential to understand how the body compartmentalizes and sequesters nutrients. Each nutrient has a preferred level in which it acts.  Some like Iodine prefer to exist and have a primary effect in the nucleus of the cell. When concentrations of Iodine in the blood or in the urine are increased or decreased, it is first important to ask why? Why would blood concentration go down? One simple answer is that there is too little Iodine in the body to saturate the tissues and therefore the level is low. However, another possible reason is that the iodine in the nuclear compartment cannot be placed correctly or used correctly and therefore the blood keeps on adjusting to compensate. There can be high nuclear Iodine with low plasma Iodine if the high concentration is above physiological limits. To break it down into somewhat laymen’s terms, in a case of elevated nuclear Iodine, the blood recognizes that there is an issue in the nuclear compartment of the cell, so in response, it keeps on trying to lower blood concentration of Iodine through elimination to provide a space for the nuclear Iodine to be dumped. If the total concentration is simply too low, Iodine supplementation is not enough because the low concentration might in fact be an indication that the body cannot place the Iodine correctly and therefore giving more will not mean better use, it will just mean more available to be discarded.

The scenario above regarding Iodine can be repeated over and over with regards to all other nutrient lab values. Calcium and Magnesium are commonly tested minerals that are frequently replaced according to blood values, without regard as to their physiological place of action or the potential issues that can surround their diminished or elevated values.  Which is why simple blood analysis is not enough, and often costs more than the results are worth.  It is more important to identify if there are issues in the various layers of the body and what kind of disruptions exist there, than it is to address individual nutrient variations specifically. Why? Because metabolic dysfunction does not happen to just one nutrient, it happens to all of those in a particular layer of the body which have similar metabolic effects.  Basically, if Calcium is disrupted, then so will be Manganese, Cobalt, Copper, and Selenium because they all act in the same level of the body and all have similar metabolic effects.

Metabolic disruption is the cornerstone of every disease process, and its identification takes place using a combination of physical exam, urine testing, and simple blood analysis.  Boutique labs should be largely discarded, as they cannot identify the real issues and waste patients time with expensive evaluations followed by supplementation with is not based on reality. Your blood is an amazing window into the body, providing a glimpse of what is happening at that moment, but often one has to read between the lines to get the real story, something few medical schools bother to teach.