Dr. Diane Mueller explains why functional medicine uses tighter lab ranges than conventional medicine. She uses thyroid testing as an example: checking TSH and T4 alone misses problems that show up when you also measure active T3, the form your body actually uses.
Hey, everybody. So functional medicine lab values are really important conversation. My name is Dr. Diane Mueller, and I specialize in functional medicine. And one of the things I want you to orient to is in functional medicine, we're really looking at optimal health. So the way lab values are classically come up with is when all of the labs come into a lab company, the top 2.5% of the labs and the bottom 2.5% of the labs are abnormal. So basically, usually how this is calculated in conventional medicine is the middle 95% is considered normal. The problem with this is, take thyroid, for example. The people that come in for thyroid labs typically are people with thyroid problems. It's not like they're. We're test like testing healthy populations very frequently. So what we're really saying in the thyroid example, when we're looking at reference ranges, we're really saying that out of everybody that has thyroid symptoms, and let's say low thyroid symptoms, if the thyroid is low. So we have constipation and fatigue and weight gain and hair loss, all these types of things, of everybody that has these classic thyroid symptoms, so they're getting their thyroid tested, 95% of them are normal. So you really have to be this huge outlier to be able to be diagnosed with some of these disease processes. And in functional medicine, our goal is not to really diagnose disease. That's true, we do some of that. But it's much more oriented to where are people functioning optimally. And thyroid is a great example because classically, one of the only things that's typically looked at is tsh. TSH is the brain hormone. It's the brain hormone that actually tells your thyroid to work. And so essentially what winds up happening is if you just test tsh, sometimes the brain hormone is looking normal, but the thyroid is just not responding. So we really want to test the brain hormone and the thyroid hormones and the other types of thyroid values that are relevant. So thyroid hormones are things like T4 and T3. T. T4 is the inactive version of thyroid versus T3 is the active. So when our body creates thyroid hormone, we actually have to activate it by changing T4 to T3. This is another reason why when we only measure T4, that is a problem as well. So really understanding not just where the values fall if you have disease, but really understanding the values of where things look for people that are healthy, that are optimal, that are functioning so super well, is really important in terms of thyroid health, in terms of white blood cell health, in terms of your overall health. In general. So I'm going to put a link to this chart. If you are watching this on YouTube, I'm going to put a link to this functional medicine value chart here in the show notes. But then also, if you need any help in getting labs run and looking for any of your health issues, make sure you book a free health evaluation consult with one of my team members to see if we're a good fit for you. And of course, if you're watching this on YouTube and you like this information, please subscribe to the channel. We'll see you next time.
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