The Functional Medicine Approach to Metabolic Testing
Metabolic testing is an invaluable way to get information about what is happening inside a patient’s body. However, assessing nutrient status is complex, since simply knowing the levels of the vitamin or nutrient may not give adequate information of the functional adequacy in the body.
Vitamin B12 is a good example. B12 blood level is a notoriously unreliable indicator of who will respond to B12 therapy. The current recommendation is to look at disturbances of metabolic processes that require B12 or to simply try a course of B12 injections to see who may respond. This situation seems to be true for a number of nutrients and metabolic functions: look for patterns of disturbance in the processes rather than look at one indicator alone.
We use a variety of labs and lab techniques to help us determine in which patients these disturbances may be a factor in chronic illness.
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