As an Integrative Medicine doctor I frequently have patients who have been on a long health journey but have not got many answers. They aren’t well, they don’t feel right with sometimes a myriad of symptoms but the routine tests from the GP come back as ‘normal’. This frustrating experience is surprisingly common with an estimated 1 in 4 people who visit their GP according to the NHS, given the label of ‘medically unexplained symptoms’. For some, they may never receive a diagnosis and instead their care will be based on symptom management alone.

For me, this highlights the limitations of conventional medicine and where Integrative Medicine and using functional testing is exceptionally helpful.

Functional testing moves beyond just symptoms diagnosis and management and looks to uncover the root cause of health issues. Whilst standard tests primarily look for disease markers, functional testing (which covers a very broad range of body systems from hormonal health, to genetics and detoxification) evaluate how well your body’s systems are actually functioning, revealing imbalances, deficiencies and dysfunctions hopefully before they can progress into disease.

With functional tests we don’t rely on ‘normal’ values, we always look for optimal. This is because normal lab ranges are values that 95% of a healthy population falls into – so a normal result doesn’t always indicate a healthy result, in fact it can indicate un an healthy population! For someone to feel truly well we can’t rely on statistical data. For instance, getting your vitamin D tests back from the GP might indicate your results are in fact normal. But if you are on the low end of the norm, borderline deficient or perhaps you need more vitamin D than an average person (for instance if you have an autoimmune disease) this ‘normal’ result could be leaving you feeling less than well.

When used responsibly and ethically, functional testing is such a powerful tool and the tests available are only getting better and more sophisticated every year. They are a useful, often essential, tool in integrative medicine, but one that comes with responsibility and the use of functional testing should always come with important ethical considerations.

If you’d like to learn more about this fascinating subject, there are still tickets for our conference next week 𝘛𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯 𝘐𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘏𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘩𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘦: 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘌𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘒𝘯𝘰𝘸𝘭𝘦𝘥𝘨𝘦. We have some absolutely brilliant speakers from RGCC International, Invivo Healthcare, Lifecode Gx and doctors from a medical and functional medicine background. I’d love to see as many of you there to continue the conversation – tickets available in person here at NCIM or online and recorded.

NCIM Conference: Testing in Integrative Healthcare: The Ethics of Knowledge – NCIM – National Centre for Integrative Medicine