top of page
Search

Happy and Healthy New Year!

December 31, 2025

Happy New Year to you all!

It has been a hot minute since I have sent out a new blog post  and part of that reason is because the practice seems to always be evolving in one way or another.  This is necessary to help people in the best way possible, but it involves researching, trying things out, learning more and making another plan.

Many people have been talking to me about supplements recently and I am often as guilty as the next person in researching my “symptoms” and finding a supplement that will treat the symptom.  My social media and email feeds are full of important ads for exactly what will cure what ails me.  Ah….if only it were just that simple!  It isn’t.  We are bio-diverse, unique individuals and simply treating symptoms does little to help regain or maintain health.

We’ve done the diet, exercised at least some, worked on our sleep and stress, taken the supplements or medications and still, good health eludes us.  It must be our cortisol, right?  We need to take cortisol blocker, right?  Well, how do you know that you need this supplement?  It’s the symptoms that drives our information and our pocketbook.  How many supplements are loafing around in cupboards or drawers, or right out in plain sight that we started and now aren’t taking because we saw no appreciable  changes in our symptoms or health.

This monologue is not to discourage anyone from experimenting, but to draw attention to the fact that you may not know what supplements you need and treating symptoms rarely gets to the root of our main problem.  We are the sum of our parts and each part of our body interacts with other parts of the body.  We forget about that when we look at symptoms from the current medical model which chops up the parts of the body and meets it out to the “ologists”….the people who study and deal with only one piece of the body without realizing that each “piece” functions with other pieces to form the whole body.  We visit each practitioner depending on what we need, the urologist, the gynecologist, the otolaryngologist, the hematologist.  Who is the orchestra leader that puts the pieces back together and makes sense of the entire opus? 

Working with women, my primary questions deal with inability to lose weight, poor sleep, anxiety and depression, digestive disorders, fatigue, pain in joints, osteoporosis to name a few and what I have come to know is that what most of us suffer from is inflammation and basic metabolic chaos.  Try to have your insurance company find those diagnostic codes! 

As we begin the New Year, I encourage you to make an assessment of your own health and write down your “wish list”.   Then have some comprehensive testing done.  Your insurance may not pay for these tests, but you likely have spent enough money on supplements that don’t change your health that you could have afforded to have these tests run. 

I will share my experience with having functional testing done with you.  Here are tests that my primary care practitioner would have run and my insurance would have paid for.


5 of 15 Biomarkers

HDL-Cholesterol…….In Range . 56 mg/dL

LDL Pattern… In Range . A

Total Cholesterol…..In Range . 197 mg/dL

Total Cholesterol / HDL Ratio….In Range · 3.5 (calc)

Triglycerides…In Range . 91 mg/dL


Oh my goodness!  I should be just as happy as a clam in warm sand with these results!!!  My practitioner was happy with this, but there is more to this story that would have been missed if I hadn't had functional testing done.


Heart Biomarkers

Apolipoprotein B (ApoB)……Above Range . 99 mg/dL

HDL Large….Below Range . 6128 nmol/L

High-Sensitivity C-Reactive Protein (hs-CRP)…Above Range . 12.1 mg/L!!! YIKES!!!

LDL Medium…..Above Range . 322 nmol/L

LDL Particle Number… Above Range . 1233 nmol/L

LDL Peak Size…Below Range . 221.3 Angstrom

LDL Small…Above Range . 209 nmol/L

LDL-Cholesterol….Above Range . 122 mg/dL (calc)

Lipoprotein (a)…..Above Range · 90 nmol/L

Non-HDL Cholesterol… Above Range . 141 mg/dL (calc)


Gulp!  I have some work to do, for sure.  This is only the heart portion of what a functional lab test might look like. There is more to health than meets the eye with simple basic testing. 

Here is what connecting the dots looks like for this portion of my testing:

  • The combination of very high hs-CRP and multiple adverse cholesterol markers (LDL-C, ApoB, Lipoprotein(a)) links systemic inflammation directly with increased heart and blood vessel risk.

  • Suboptimal omega-3 and zinc levels may be contributing to both the heightened inflammation (hs-CRP) and the lipid/lipoprotein disturbances seen, amplifying cardiovascular and metabolic vulnerabilities.


I supplemented my diet with omega-3 and zinc two weeks ago and guess what?  I feel better and….I'm moving better and that means that I am reducing the inflammation in my body!  Yay!

I share this personal information with you because often I am the guinea pig for my practice.  I do the tests, I wear the continuous glucose monitor, etc., because I want to know firsthand that health can improve.


I hope that if you are experiencing some health concerns that you consider having a visit, doing some testing and moving toward your best health.  Avoid just buying singular supplements, no matter how convincing they may be. While they could work, they will not work in the cupboard after just a few weeks and you will have less money in your pocket. 

Above all else, my wish for you as we move toward the New Year is that you are happy, healthy and that all good things come together for you. 

Be well!

Joanne

 

To have functional testing done, you can click here or go to my website and click on the testing link.

or

 
 
 

Comments

bottom of page