Functional Test
If you have ever been told, ‘your blood tests are normal’, not ‘normal’ or not yourself, then you have already discovered one of the reasons functional testing has become so popular. Functional tests are designed to provide additional information about how the body is functioning. They may explore areas such as hormones, digestion, nutrient status, fatty acids, the microbiome, genetics, metabolism, or stress physiology. Think of them as gathering more pieces of the health puzzle, ideally before a dis-ease ‘shows up’. Sadly, most people turn to functional tests, once they have a dis-ease.
The ideal place for these tests is in preventive medicine, but they are still super valuable when a disease is already present.
At the New School of Nutritional Medicine, we teach functional testing as a tool, not a diagnosis. A test result without context is simply just numbers, dials, charts etc. The real skill lies in understanding how that information relates to the ‘patient’. We teach our students to never treat the test, but to understand the human being behind it. Let’s face it, health is rarely found in a single marker, number, coloured graph or a pretty pie chart.
