What is Functional Blood Chemistry?

It is a frustrating experience to feel absolutely terrible and have your doctor tell you that your bloodwork and all of your tests are 'normal' . This is quite common with hormonal imbalances as well as with many of the over 2,000 named autoimmune diseases (300 new classifications added every year). Often after being poked and prodded in about every way possible and everything is still 'normal' , you may be labeled with a vague diagnosis of 'fibromyalgia' or 'mitrochondrial disease'.
The reason this happens is that lab abnormal ranges are set to identify most life threatening diseases. There are many health problems that can cause you to feel so terrible, it often feels like you must be dying. These health problems may not yet be life threatening and therefore your lab tests will come back as 'normal'. A functional bloodwork analysis can be done on the same bloodwork you have done at your yearly physical, or when you are trying to figure out what is 'wrong' with you.
Functional ranges are a lot smaller than disease state ranges, and meant to identify patterns rather than diseases. In other words, the smaller ranges are used to identify weak organ systems, or areas you need to strengthen. Strengthening can be done with a number of different techniques from exercise to specific nutrition and lifestyle changes. A functional bloodwork assessment should be done by someone trained to identify patterns of bloodwork with functional deficiencies.
Eating healthy, exercise, supplements, and taking care of yourself is not covered by your health insurance (seems that would be common sense, but a lot of people need to be told). Health insurance is meant to help people who suffer from life threatening or physically debilitating diseases. I believe all health problems (life threatening or not) are best served by proper nutrition and care of your body. I try to guide patients along this path using functional blood chemistry as one of many tools. And don't worry if you want your insurance to pay for it, with a few more years of doing the same thing and expecting a different result, your body will continue down the same path and eventually your lab tests will come back abnormal. At which point your doctor is likely to recommend a drug or treatment to prevent death or debilitation not disease, and of course that is covered by your insurance.
I believe we create our own destiny by the choices we make. Or as Eleanor Powell once said, "What we are is God's gift to us. What we become is our gift to God."