Dr. Diane Mueller explains why normal lab results don't mean you're healthy. Standard ranges detect disease, not optimal function. She walks through seven markers: MCV, vitamin D (optimal 70-80 ng/mL, not 40), ferritin, thyroid hormones including reverse T3, DHEA-S, and white blood cell count, each with functional medicine ranges that catch problems standard tests miss.
You know the drill. You've been to 5, 10, maybe 15 doctors. They've run your blood work, they've looked at the results, they've smiled and they've told you everything looks normal. You walk into your office, you still can't get outta bed, can't think clearly, and you're a little bit of a stranger in your own body. I'm Dr. Diane Mueller, and I want to help you make sense of this because one of the things that a lot of people are not told is that the reference ranges on state standard reports are not designed to detect perfection. They are not designed to detect optimal. They are designed to detect disease, meaning they're designed to detect abnormalities when your body is at a point of breaking down. And there's a huge gap between not sick enough to diagnose and actually well. And most chronically ill people, I find, live in that gap for years. This is why they are told they are fine, because they aren't sick enough for standard doctors to tell them they have a disease. And we are gonna talk about 7 specific lab markers that are very common markers that probably came back as normal on your report and talk about how they could actually be signs of disease. So the one I wanna talk about is MCV is the first one. This stands for mean cell volume and is run in the panel called the complete blood count. This is talking about the size of your red blood cells. When your red blood cells are deficient between, from B6, folate, or B12, when they're deficient in any one of those three, they can swell. This is normal, like optimal, when the MCV is lower than 90. Many people come in with a 95, for example, and are told they're totally normal, and they are from a standard analysis. But from a standpoint of optimal, which is what we're talking about here, there— these is a— this is a sign of B12 folate or B6 deficiency. Mm-hmm. Deficiency. Another one is vitamin D. And vitamin D, there is a sweet spot most of the time. Now, it's going to depend upon studies, but most people feel best when they are in the 70 to 80 range. We do want to be careful with pushing it too high, as there's some research that looks at when it's pushed high that there could be an increase in all-cause mortality. But the idea that a 40 vitamin D is normal will set you up for not only depression, but oftentimes chronic infections. Again, what we're talking about is not from a standpoint of disease. We're talking about how to make you optimal because you can have symptoms when you're not running optimal, but you're not having a disease according to Western medicine standards. Mm-hmm. A third marker is ferritin. Ferritin is a marker of the storage form of iron. It talks about iron stores, but it's important to understand that a lot of things can influence ferritin. Ferritin can go really high, for example, when people are very inflamed. So inflammation can impact ferritin. So if you have a very high ferritin, it may or may not be a sign of high iron. High iron. It could also be a sign of inflammation. Now, what you're looking for from an optimal standpoint is about 50 to 150 for women and about 70 to 200 for men. Now, the problem is though, we don't know for sure what ferritin is doing, what's really happening in the body without also considering iron itself. So running iron markers and other markers like TIBC can also dramatically help with understanding this marker and with considering the diagnosis and the clinical treatment of what needs to be done. The next two I want to talk about are related to the thyroid, which are TSH and free T4. These are the two most common markers for the thyroid, and the problem with these markers is not only is the reference range range, really wide, but neither of these two markers are talking about active thyroid itself. So TSH is a brain hormone that tells your thyroid to work. We are looking for your brain properly signaling the thyroid. Sometimes your brain can be sending a proper signal and the thyroid is not responding correctly. Mm-hmm. T4 is truly thyroid hormone. However, it is not active thyroid hormone, meaning it doesn't do anything as far as maintaining weight, maintaining energy, helping with hair, helping with bowel function. It doesn't have any actual thyroid activity. Actual thyroid hormone, the one that actually does stuff for your body, that one that is active, is called T3. Now you need it in its free T3 form in order for it to be able to act on the cells. So much of the time people are told their thyroid is fine and it's not. They have not done additional markers. Now there's several more that are important with the thyroid, more than we're gonna get into this video, but I wanna also name reverse T3 because if you have a high reverse T3, 3, then this is a big sign of having a blockage of thyroid at your cellular level. With high reverse T3, your cells cannot utilize thyroid correctly. And I've seen situations in clinic where this happens with a reverse T3 at 10. So we want to make sure that reverse T3 is less than 10 in order to— stop with any sort of thyroid blockage. And then the last two we're talking about— so we talked about MCV, vitamin D, ferritin, TSH, and free T4. Now the last two we're talking about are going to be DHEA and your CDC, um, white blood cell count. So DHEA is a precursor hormone to estrogen and testosterone. It goes down with age and is thought to be part of the aging process. If you get this measured, it is much more accurate if you get the DHEA-S, which is the sulfate form, tested. Most of the time, men feel best between 300 to 400, and women feel best 200 to 300. So you wanna be considering optimal ranges again. Now finally, one more marker from the CBC, which is your white blood cell count. If your white blood cell count is less than 5, it can be a sign of a chronic hidden viral infection or other type of infection. Many people come in with a 4.7, for example, and are told they are fine. And what we see from an optimal perspective is that oftentimes when there are hidden infections, the blood count, the white blood count goes below 5. 5.0. If you've not gone and taken my free quiz online to help identify other types of missing root causes that your doctors may not have tested for, I encourage you to do that at getwellquiz.com. At that— when you take that quiz, you will also get insight as to lab tests that you should be asking your doctors for so you can advocate for yourself yourself better. Again, I'm Dr. Diane Mueller. I'll see you in another video.
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