A Unique Way of Understanding Blood Test Results: Set Your Practice Apart and Still Spend Time with Your Family
Functional blood chemistry analysis has gotten a lot of attention over the past few years. Practitioners worldwide have started understanding and interpreting blood test results in a completely new way.
And you’ve seen the results in your patients: you can put the pieces together, solve their health problems, and send them home happy.
But how do you set your practice apart from other functional medicine practitioners, naturopathic doctors, chiropractors, clinical nutritionists, or any other integrative and holistic practitioner who analyzes blood test results?
And still have time to make it to your kid’s weeknight basketball game?
Plus, and this is a curveball, what if functional blood chemistry analysis isn’t as thorough as you thought?
There’s a new, research-backed way of understanding blood test results—one that saves you time, differentiates you from other practitioners, and keeps the most recent primary literature at your fingertips.
Set Your Practice Apart with a Unique Way of Understanding Blood Test Results
Finding ways to make your clinic stand out can be challenging, especially if you’re still in the first few years of owning your business.
Do you partner with colleagues who can broaden your niche?
Work with a nutritionist or health coach?
Teach monthly community-based classes?
All three will differentiate you from the office down the street. But they take a lot of time and energy to organize and implement.
What if you set yourself apart with a skill that doesn’t eat up your day and gives you a chance to keep learning the work you love so much?
Here’s your solution: Understanding blood test results in a way that is bioindividual to your patient or client.
Don’t worry: Using bioindividual blood work analysis is possible and clinically effective even if you’ve never learned functional blood chemistry analysis. We’ll cover the nine factors to focus on to get the most personalized results for your patients or clients.
And if you do have training in using functional (optimal) ranges, even better.
Bioindividual blood work analysis builds on your skillset and takes your lab interpretations (and recommendations) above and beyond functional interpretations.
LabSmarts uses the results of peer-reviewed clinical studies to identify individual influences that impact blood test results and automatically makes adjustments for you so you are interpreting blood test results using the most accurate reference ranges based on your patient’s or client’s unique physiology.
The 9 bioindividual factors that LabSmarts adjusts for include:
- _ Age
- _ Sex
- _ Ethnicity
- _ Pregnancy (by trimester)
- _ Menopausal status
- _ Menstrual phase
- _ Elevation (altitude)
- _ Alcohol intake
- _ Smoking status
The results of test interpretations change drastically when these factors are included your analysis of blood test results. These factors differ widely between patients.
Consider if your practice is located in Denver, 5,280 feet above sea level.
And that your patients tend to be postmenopausal Hispanic women who love drinking one or two glasses of wine most evenings.
The reference ranges for your patients or clients will differ from another practitioner whose practice is located in Boston, at sea level, and who tends to treat mid-30s Caucasian women trying to get pregnant.
YOU CAN’T USE THE SAME REFERENCE RANGES FOR EACH POPULATION, OR YOUR ANALYSIS WILL BE INNACURATE.
Unfortunately this happens all the time in the conventional and functional medicine space because these bioindividual factors are not considered.
How will your understanding of blood test results differ according to the population you serve?
A perfect example is people living at elevations above 3,280 feet (1,000 meters). These patients have less available oxygen in each breath they take. Their bodies have to overcompensate by generating more red blood cells to capture all of the oxygen they inhale.
This means their normal levels of red blood cells, hemoglobin, and hematocrit (the percentage by volume of red blood cells) will always be higher than people who live closer to sea level. It’s a completely normal and needed part of their physiology that should be adjusted according to elevation.
Conventional and functional blood chemistry analyses generally DO NOT account for the bioindividual influence of elevation.
These methods also overlook other factors that impact the interpretation of blood test results.
Let’s return to the first example of a practice in Denver, CO that primarily serves postmenopausal Hispanic women who frequently enjoy wine.
- Postmenopausal women have naturally higher levels of alkaline phosphatase versus premenopausal women.
- Hispanic people have higher levels of specific lipoproteins than Caucasian people.
- Finally, weekly alcohol consumption can affect red blood cell count (RBC), mean corpuscular volume (MCV), aspartate aminotransferase (AST), alanine aminotransferase (ALT), lactate dehydrogenase, gamma-glutamyl transferase (GGT), and may increase certain lipoproteins (1).
Each of these bioindividual differences will influence target ranges and your recommendations. And they will ensure that your patients get fantastic outcomes while your office gets busier and busier.
Save Time While Understanding Blood Tests Results
At first glance, bioindividual blood work analysis may seem a bit complex. But it gets easier and even time efficient once you start linking the nine primary factors with your patient demographic.
And there’s a way to simplify the process even more.
Grab a free trial of LabSmarts’ bioindividual blood work software. We incorporate the influences of age, sex, pregnancy (according to trimester), smoking status, menopausal status, ethnicity, elevation, alcohol intake, and menstrual phase into every patient’s analysis (where applicable).
The software also creates easy-to-understand handouts to help you communicate with patients, and there’s in-depth, frequently updated education for you built right into every results analysis.
Plus, you can use the comparison feature to monitor marker changes over multiple years.
No more Excel spreadsheets!
References
- Hillers VN, Massey LK, Alldredge JR. Effects of alcohol use and other health practices on blood chemistries and blood pressure. Alcohol Alcohol. 1986;21(2):207-212. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3741554
