Women’s health testing: a guide for you
Interpreting your medical test results — a necessary element of maintaining
women’s health
by Marcelle Pick, OB/GYN NP
In my practice, I’ve found that educating women about their lab results right away
allows them to track their own progress and gives them more power and incentive
to make positive changes in their lives — before needing a prescription or a procedure.
This section is geared toward giving you some essential information that I feel
all women deserve to have at their fingertips. By understanding more about routine
medical tests for women, you can begin better advocating for yourself:
“Within normal limits” — not the same as optimally healthy
As a practitioner of functional medicine, my “normal” ranges are often narrower
than those used in conventional medicine.
As a rule of thumb for interpreting many lab test results, I take the median of
the two extremes and then add 25% on either side of that number. If patients fall
outside of this range, we’ll want to start making nutritional and lifestyle changes
right away.
These choices can often reverse a trend before the changes become degenerative,
chronic, or permanent.
A lot of our medical technology and testing is geared toward simply finding and
tracking health problems, rather than preventing them in the first place — and many
practitioners use labs and imaging studies as signposts of disease rather than looking
at the overall portrait they paint of a woman’s health. I can’t tell you how many
women have come to me saying they had no idea they were headed down the path toward
diabetes, heart disease, or hypothyroidism until they’d progressed so far their
practitioners were recommending prescription drugs.
The reality is that in today’s busy medical practices most practitioners don’t have
time to sit and explain each test and each result to their patients. In my recent
article on the truth about modern healthcare, I explain why you are your own best
health advocate.
Your own path to health
Even the best practitioner doesn’t know what it feels like to be in your body. We
are all living our own lives, with our own family and personal stories. I am a true
believer that these stories influence our health in many ways, making us all different.
Blood levels that may be normal for some might not feel good for you. Just as one
weight might suit one woman but cause health problems in another.
Any practitioner will agree that there are lab tests that signal immediate attention
no matter who the patient is. But for most patients we’re looking at small changes.
When I look at any of the above lab results, I always measure them against those
that came before and place them in the context of the whole-patient picture. If
we can catch a trend upward or downward, we can intervene before the disease process
sets in or continues on its path.
And, when it comes to the science of medical testing, we can oftentimes see health
issues even before they start to cause problems. If we’re smart about it, we can
change the outcome for the better. Using modern technology along with the wisdom
of your own body can do wonders in terms of preventing disease and setting you up
for a long and healthy future.
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Last Modified Date: 04/27/2012
Principal Author: Marcelle Pick, OB/GYN NP