Episode 258
Title: Why Blood is NOT the Gold Standard for Health Information
Host: Dr. Nicole Rivera
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Transcription:
What's up everyone. Dr. Nicole here and welcome to another episode of integrative you radio. So I'm talking about a topic today that I've probably should have talked about a long time ago, but there, I just had a recent situation that it brought this up again of the many, many times while I've been in practice for 13 years.
And I just was like, you know what? I need to talk about this because We have been fed the biggest bullshit lie that blood work is the fucking gold standard of understanding our health and well being. And it sure as hell isn't, because there is so much room for error, which we're going to talk a little bit more about.
But I want to tell you a little bit more about what provoked me to do this. So I'm going to tell you about the recent story, and then I'll tell you about a story from the past. So recently, I have a client. I've worked with her for a couple of years. I know her very well. And I'm also a practitioner that I don't just look at objective labs, but I also take into consideration the subjective.
What is my client telling me about how they're doing, how they're functioning, how they're feeling, et cetera. In addition to that, I don't look at just biochemistry, AK blood work as the end all be all. That's why I became a weird doctor. I always laugh and I'm like, do you think that I wanted to be weird?
Do you think that I wanted to buy all these fancy fucking technologies? And do you think that I wanted to try to explain to everyone why we do bioenergetic medicine. And we do DNA testing, you know, how exhausting that was for so many frigging years because no one got it. And I felt a duty to convince people that it was the, the real version of medicine.
And now I don't give a shit. Now, if you're curious, I'll tell you all about it, but if you're skeptical, go somewhere else. I could care less. Anyway, total tangent. So, client been working with her and she has had highs and lows with her thyroid. And so she was, uh, not working with us for a little while. She just came back and I had a hunch, you know, okay, thyroid is probably off a bit, you know, some of the symptoms that she had.
So anyway, we get started and she's doing really, really well. And all of her quote unquote thyroid symptoms that she had from mood swings, hair falling out, low energy, nails being brittle and weak, weight gain, pretty much they were all resolved. And so, I was like, okay, well, I'm glad everything was resolved, but I do have you on certain supplements that are you know, enhancing thyroid function.
I am a practitioner that I never want to use those things long term. I want to give your thyroid or your hormones the boost that they need. I want to remove the obstacles going on in the body, like inflammation and toxins, gut issues, et cetera. And I want to let your body do what it knows how to do. I want to, I want your body to get to a place that it can do it on its own again.
So we were using a thyroid supplement and I was like, let's run your levels so that we could see where we're at. One, make sure that you're on the proper dose of the supplement to let's see, you know, if we're going to be able to get you off of this soon, just by giving your body more of the nutrients that it needs.
So anyway, we go, we do the blood work, and her TSH, for those of you that don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, that's okay, I'm gonna make it super simple, TSH is the hormone that comes from your pituitary gland, from your brain, and it's set, it's called thyroid stimulating hormone, it sends a signal down to your thyroid to make the thyroid hormone called T4.
And so your brain and your thyroid are constantly talking to each other. And so when your TSH goes up, um, it's pretty much like the boy who cried wolf. It's like your thyroid's not making the thyroid hormone, so your brain's like sending the signal like, Hey, can you do it? Hey, can you do it? Hey, can you do it?
And then eventually, if your thyroid keeps not making it, then you're going to have your TSH drop. So anyway, um, when we first tested her, her TSH was high. It was like a five. It really shouldn't be higher than a three. And so we're like, okay, no problem, let's work with it. And everything was looking good.
So, like I said, all of her symptoms resolved. Go run her lab work, we're 12 weeks later. Her TSH comes up as an 85. In 85! Like, it shouldn't be higher than 3! I've never seen that in the entire duration of time that I've been working with clients. Like, in my brain, that's like, not, that's not even possible.
Even if she was super sick. But she feels great. So I reach out to the lab. Hi, is there a probability that there was an error in processing the sample? Oh, well, you know, I don't think, we don't think so, but um, okay, blah, blah, blah. So then, they're like, we'll run it again. And I'm thinking in my head, run it again?
It's been, it's been two weeks. You still have her blood? And you think that the blood is still a viable sample to, to be tested? What? Like, so, okay. They rerun it. Same. Same. I'm like, this doesn't make any fucking sense. So we decide to go with a different lab and I was like, okay, we're going to run every thyroid marker because if this is truly right, I need to see what the hell is going on.
Like, do we have an autoimmune attack? Do we have, you know, Hashimoto's, Graves? Do we have reverse T3, T4, T3? Like what's going on here? Rerun it. Everything is perfect. Every single marker is completely in range. I ran like 12 thyroid markers. Every single marker, totally fine. Hmm, crazy. Okay, cool. Just another reminder that this is not the fucking gold standard, and you can't rely on that.
If I didn't use my brain, and if I did not retest, And I was a conventional doctor, we would have been playing the most insane game of putting her on high, high, high doses of thyroid medication. She probably would have ended up with her hair falling out, she could have ended up in the hospital, like, it could have been a fucking nightmare.
So, at the day, if you want to stick with the conventional medicine, fantastic, but like, Don't, if you, if something doesn't feel right or seem right, ask your doctor to rerun it. And also, probably try to work with a doctor that uses their brain and doesn't just rely on one little lab test. Because that's the thing with thyroid doctors, endocrinologists, they only run the TSH.
They're not running the other markers. So they just rely on that one number to like dictate your fate, which is so crazy because there's so much more complexity when it comes to thyroid function and the fact that the thyroid communicates with your brain. Your pituitary gland communicates with your reproductive organs, communicates with your adrenal glands, so on and so forth.
It, there is, it's a very loaded topic because your thyroid doesn't act independently. So, here's my other story. Many moons ago, I ran a test for a client. I ran my conventional blood work, or my, uh, comprehensive blood work. And I ran my custom panel, which is looking at all markers from, you know, minerals and nutrients, vitamin D, um, thyroid function, liver function, kidney function, etc.
But I also, uh, tested for some things that were infection based, one of them being Lyme disease. So in my little portal, you know, the person's name pops up and it tells me if their labs are coming through. So this person was in my portal twice. Like, that's really strange. Maybe she went and split her blood work up because it was like too much blood at one time.
But as I go in, It's the same panel ran twice, so I'm just confused about that. So anyway, I'm looking at the results. Obviously, I would think it's the same blood, it was ran at a very similar time, it should look the same. One of the results in my portal said that this person had active Lyme disease. The second set of results, the Lyme disease panel was completely negative.
And I run something called the Western Blot, so it was a multitude of bands. It wasn't just one marker, it was a multitude of markers inside of this panel. And again, got on the phone. Can you explain this to the lab? Uh, uh, yeah, we don't, we don't know. What do you mean you don't know? And why was the blood, blood ran twice?
How could it yield such a different result? Uh, we don't know what to tell you, just run it again. So you mean to tell me that there are multiple people in the world that are getting panels back saying that they have active Lyme disease when in reality they don't? Oh, well, we can't speak to that. Very, very bizarre.
Uh, it was a couple of weeks later. I was traveling for work and I was sitting on the plane and the guy next to me was retired. From LabCorp. He worked in corporate and I won't go into details, but he essentially spilled the beans and said, oh, yeah, there's human error all the time. All the time. He's like, think about it.
He's like, humans are handling it. There's different reagents that get mixed. There's also the how the blood is, um. how it's spun, if it's frozen at the right temperature, if it's kept at the right temperature. He's like, you know, everything has to be processed differently and humans are handling it, so there's a lot of opportunity for human error.
And I was like, do you mean to the capacity that people could get a cancer diagnosis but don't have cancer? And he's like, kind of like, long pause. Yeah, okay, fantastic. So, for any of us, the moral of the story is you need to always, always get a second opinion. Probably get it from a different lab than the original one.
In addition to that is, you need to know that the way you feel and your subjective feedback is equally as important as your lab's. So you can't just go and say, I feel pretty good. And then the doctor's like, Oh, your labs look like total shit. Oh, you need, you need this medication, this medication, this surgery.
This is a get a second opinion. If you literally go and you're like, I feel pretty good. And you're like, Oh, you have stage four cancer. Get another opinion and also get more data on your body than just. biochemical data. There is imaging that exists out there. There's all different advanced imaging nowadays for screening for, for cancers and tumors and thyroid disease and everything else.
Get imaging done. Use someone that is more integrated. And get other analysis done on your DNA, get bioenergetic testing, get the blood work to get enough data that it all comes together and it makes, it creates a story that makes sense. That's the thing. Sometimes I see things in people's labs and I'm like, and they're like, Oh, what is this?
I Googled it and I'm like, actually, this marker is irrelevant because it's a, it's an effect. From these other things that are going on. So like the one, it always happens that way. It's the one thing that they get super freaked out about. And I'm like, this is, this is a non issue. Because this is only looks this way because of these other factors.
So you have to have multiple data points that come together that paint a picture. And you sure as hell cannot rely on one test, you shouldn't even rely just on one lab. You should be looking at using a multitude of data points, a multitude of labs, a multitude of information in order to really know what's going on in your system.
And so for those of you that are like, I feel really overwhelmed with this entire idea. Well, guess what? You should be overwhelmed because the majority of doctors will never fucking understand this. They will never understand that gold, that gold, that blood is not the gold standard. They will never even admit that there's a possibility that there's error in those labs.
And they sure as hell don't have enough knowledge or interest to go outside of the box and look at other forms of testing, you know, and especially when doctors are medical based, there's a lot of red tape. They can't go and get technologies like that I use and put them in their medical practice because if somebody comes in and said they're going to say, You better get rid of that or we're taking your license away.
Because it's all about pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceuticals, pharmaceuticals, pharmaceuticals. At the end of the day, they run the labs to look at a level to prescribe a pharmaceutical. Like don't you, don't you see that? It's manipulation of levels. That's all that it's about. Manipulation of levels. There's nothing more than that.
They're not manipulating your levels through diet and decreasing your stress. They're manipulating your levels through biochemical modulators, a. k. a. pharmaceuticals. So if that's what the route you want to go, then stay in the, in that system. But if you're like, no, I don't want pharmaceuticals, then you need to go outside of that because that's just how the system works.
And there's no, there's never going to be another recommendation. Like there's never going to be, they might say eat more broccoli. You're like, well, I fucking hate broccoli. I don't know. Don't eat as much fat. I don't eat fat. I don't know, sugar? Like, like sometimes I hear things from my clients that, you know, they, they're, they're taking their parents to conventional doctors or, you know, Um, you know, their husband won't buy into what we do, and he's still going, and, and they tell me the shit that goes on in these offices, and I just can't help but laugh.
But, anyway, the moral of the story is, blood is not the gold standard. Stop thinking that it is, get outside the box, get more data, and be in the driver's seat of your health, because your health is Not that complicated. Your body is extremely resilient with the right information and the right tools. You can get your body on track very quickly, very easily, and your body can bounce back from literally anything.
And always listen to your body. Listen to your intuition, please. If you go and they say, Oh, you have X and you're like, Oh, that doesn't feel right. That doesn't feel aligned. Listen to yourself. And go get more information. Alright guys, love you forever.
