Labs Needed: Is your doctor running these these labs?
If you are seeing a doctor for headaches and nothing is helping, read this story.
Recently, I had a new patient present to me following 1 year of post-concussion symptoms. She had been to multiple practitioners for her headache, and nothing had helped. Often times hormones are overlooked as well as anemia, inflammatory markers and autoimmune diseases. We ran comprehensive labs and found a boat-load of abnormal findings which were directly correlating with her symptoms and inability to get better.
One of the things we do with every concussion patient is determine their metabolic capacity. This concept is new for many people, but imperative to understand when providing neurological rehab, especially when dealing with injured brains. Essentially what metabolic capacity means is how much gas do you have in the tank to do the task ask hand. This is measured by how sensitive you are to light, movement, sound, as well as functional movements like balance, coordination, speech, gait and eye movements.
When we determine someone has poor metabolic capacity, running a comprehensive lab analysis is often the next step. Many times running a “comprehensive lab” through conventional doctors ends up with incomplete labs being run. The following is often an incomplete lab that we see run by conventional doctors:
- CMP
- Cholesterol
- CBC w/ differential
- Vitamin D
- TSH, T4
Our patients fill out Metabolic, Brain Localization, and Brain Health Assessment forms prior to being seen, and this helps to direct us towards which labs we need to run, and which systems to focus on when providing nutritional therapies to help improve metabolic capacity that helps to ultimately heal up the brain and improve your symptoms.
Typical labs that we run are often more comprehensive and complete when evaluating multiple systems:
- CMP
- Cholesterol, breakdown of Apo A/B
- CBC w/ differential and platelets
- Vitamin D
- TSH, Total T3 and T4, Free T3 and T4, T3Uptake, Reverse T3, Thyroperoxidase antibodies, Thyrobinding globulin antibodies
- hsCRP and ESR
- Homocysteine
- HbA1c and C-peptide, LDH
- Ferritin, Iron, TIBC
- Uric Acid
- 24 hour saliva Cortisol testing
- Full hormone panel- pregnenolone, progesterone, DHEA-s, estradiol, test. total and free
- Comprehensive stool analysis
- Genetic SNPs testing
- Viral testing
We will expand on the additional and comprehensive testing that we perform in our office on complex cases in future blogs. Stay tuned and as always, please contact us with any questions regarding your health!
