As a patient, you may be surprised to learn that the lab where your blood was drawn developed their pathological ranges based only on the people who have had blood work analyzed by that same lab within the last year.
This means that these pathological ranges are not standardized from lab to lab or from state to state. So there could be differences between the highs and lows for each biomarker, depending on where you had your blood drawn.
For example, your results for the thyroid biomarker TSH, can be considered normal in one state, or from one lab’s point of view, but diseased based in another state and/or at another lab.
You Health is Being Compared Against People Who Are Already Sick
What this means is that guidelines for diagnosing a thyroid condition, an auto immune condition, a gastrointestinal condition, etc., are based soley on the blood drawn from people who came to that particular lab, located in that particular city and state over the previous year.
And we can also assume that the labs “normal ranges” were derived from these same people who were likely in some degree of poor health to begin with.
Your Health is Being Compared Against People Who Are Already Taking Medication
To make matters worse, many of the people you are being compared with are already taking hormones for their thyroid, insulin for their diabetes, statin drugs for their cholesterol etc which can distort these ranges even more.
And when you factor in anyone with an undiagnosed illness and their skewed biomarkers, you can begin to see the lab’s ranges may not be the best way to define what’s normal.
Lab Ranges Have Broadened Over the Years, Too!
But it doesn’t just end there. These pathological ranges have broadened over the past 50 years as the health of the American population has declined. Take blood sugar and diabetes for example, lab ranges that were once considered hypoglycemic (low blood sugar) or pre-diabetic (high blood sugar) years ago, before sugary drinks, snacks and candy became dietary staples are now considered normal on many labs.
So, nowadays by the time someone’s levels are outside these pathological lab ranges, their condition is pretty advanced and that’s why the standard lab ranges are referred to as pathological ranges or disease ranges.
Now that’s not to say that the pathological ranges are without benefit because they certainly help diagnose diseases that require medical intervention. It’s just that they are of little value for gauging what constitutes good health in today’s society or for helping to identify a problem before it’s too late.
People Suffering Needlessly When It Doesn’t Have to be That Way
Perhaps now you can begin to see how many people will suffer needlessly for months and years with a potential auto immune condition (Graves, Hashimotos), thyroid condition, blood sugar condition, liver condition etc., and how those conditions could have been easily prevented if they only had been diagnosed sooner.
So, the question you need to ask yourself the next time you have blood work done is this:
Do you really want to compare your health against all the sick people in your area? Or do you want to compare your health and your lab results against parameters that constitute good health?
Well we certainly don’t want to treat our patients using disease parameters, so we use functional blood range parameters.
American Association of Clinical Chemists
And you will be happy to know that these functional ranges are the same across the country…they don’t change. They have been developed by the American Association of Clinical Chemists over many years and they allow a patient to know where their blood test results need to be if they ever expect to enjoy good health, adequate energy, healthy digestion, ideal physiological function and a sharp mental focus.