Empowering Women in Chiropractic - The Top 10 Lab Tests You Should Know

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Hello everybody. Dr. Julie McLaughlin here for Empowering Women by ChiroSecure. I am super excited you joined me today because you are gonna learn about the top 10 blood tests to reverse and prevent chronic disease. So let's get started. I have few slides to show you and. Hopefully you're gonna take away some really good information about lab tests and chronic disease and the things that we can do.

But first, let's thank ChiroSecure. Let's give them lots of hearts. Thumbs up love, because they are an amazing company. They make sure we are all safe with our insurance and they have sponsored all of these shows and all these events to really bring more information and education to our profession.

So we love ChiroSecure. So thank you so much. So let's get started on these blood tests. So we're gonna talk about maybe the top six preventable chronic diseases. So talk about heart disease, gut problems, adrenal fatigue, energy, everybody's all tired, arthritis degeneration, anemia's in deficiencies in diabetes.

So these are the big ones that we can really easily test for when we're looking at lab work with our patients. And if you're just starting out with functional medicine, or even if you're just thinking about adding it to your practice, this is gonna give you an overview of why you would even wanna consider this and what some of the tests look like.

So I'm gonna go through the test and tell you what they are and then we'll make a little bit deeper dive into each one. So we're gonna look at a cholesterol panel. We're gonna look at advanced cholesterol panel. Hopefully you've heard of that before, but we're gonna talk about that. We're gonna look at inflammation markers, blood sugar panel, the vitamin B panel Number six is gonna be the liver enzymes.

Seven's gonna be C B C deficiency panel. We're gonna look at essential fatty acids and genetics. So those are top tens that we look at to really hone in to make a difference in these chronic disease. So the first one is the lipid panel. And I wanna tell you this lipid panel is 50 years old. Isn't it crazy?

I dunno about you, but I wouldn't test my dog with something that's 50 years old. So that's why we wanna have the advanced lipid panel in addition. To this lipid panel. So the lipid panel is gonna really monitor them on a plaque being laid down in your arteries and how much is getting cleaned up. And it's gonna help us determine your cardiovascular risk.

And there's so many lifestyle things, nutrition, that we can do to absolutely make sure that you have the cholesterol in trig, lyce. Possible. So you look at total cholesterol, which is really just a math problem, right? It's just the H D L, the good cholesterol plus the L D L plus, another little one called V L D L.

And you literally add those numbers together and it equals a total. So that's why we always wanna look at ratios on these that's gonna give us the best information. Triglycerides, which are fat plus of sugar, that cause is sticky. And that's what causes our plaque to stick in our arteries. And so sugar's gonna elevate this, alcohol's gonna elevate this.

So changing your lifestyle is gonna make a big difference on these. And you'll see on some of these ranges that I have on the slides, They're a little different than you'll see on a traditional lab test, cuz these are functional medicine ranges. So we want your triglycerides below one 15. The labs will say one 50.

And we want your HDLs for men above 50 and for women above 60 where the labs will say above 40. So we really wanna put you in the healthiest range to make sure you are not getting any of these disease and. We're not using things that are 50 years old, so we have to up our game and do some more advanced lipid testing.

So these are a couple of advanced lipid tests. The Apo B tells us how sticky the bad cholesterol is, so that goes with. With the L D L, the SD L D L I call it super dangerous, L D L. That again tells us about l d, but it tells us about the size. So if the size is small, it's more likely to plaque up your arteries, where if it's big, it's easier to clean up.

It's not gonna be a problem. And then APO A one. This tells us about the quality or how hard your good cholesterol, your HDL works. There's a few other little advanced blood markers like LP little A that we look at in a couple others, but for the most part, If you are looking at these along with the lipid panel, you're gonna have a good overall risk ratio for patients.

One of the ratios that we look at is a ratio between the APO B and the APO A one, and this gives us our highest predictor of a future coronary event, which. , when you're looking at prevention, we can work on things to reverse these, and we do it all the time with our functional medicine patients, and we see changes in as little as three months.

Okay, so inflammation. We know inflammation is really the upstream problem for all these downstream disease, like high cholesterol, diabetes, arthritis. So we measure inflammation. The highly sensitive, or H S C R P is a marker. Measures cardiac risk. So C R P is gonna measure just overall inflammation, but if you have elevate.

Hs. C R P, you know that you are going to be causing heart disease and plaque. And let's face it, heart disease are our number one killer. And so we really wanna make sure that we put this inflammation to rest because we don't wanna get those downstream diseases. Okay. The metabolic panel, we definitely have a crisis in this country with this, with diabetes, pre-diabetes, insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, you name it.

And most of the time when patients are going to get their blood test, they're just getting their glucose test. And you know that varies. You could get your glucose tested 20 times a day and you get 20 different numbers based on your exercise, or which you're eating, or which you're not eating, or intermittent fasting, whatever you're doing, that glucose is gonna be all over the place.

So when we look at our patients, we wanna get a really good measurement. We wanna look at the hemoglobin a1c, which is actually a three month blood marker. By looking at them for three months, it's gonna give us a much more look at what we can do to change it. Insulin. Insulin is a fat fertilizer when their insulin's going up.

They could have high insulin and normal glucose and normal hemoglobin a1c because they're in that pre-diabetic mode or that insulin resistant mode. They can't lose weight. They're gaining weight. and they will easily flip into diabetes. So you always wanna measure that. And the last one is Homer ir. And this is actually a calculation between the glucose and the insulin, and it's a predictor for diabetes.

So these tests are really important if you're ordering some panels to take a look at. Now let's talk about some deficiencies and anemias. We know b12, folic acid. We see patients with this a lot with neuropathy. All kinds of problems with the nervous system. So it's super, super important to test these.

And in a few minutes I'm gonna talk about one of the genes that affects that folic acid. So sometimes people think that they're taking vitamins over the counter and that they're getting plenty of vitamins and maybe they're even eaten decently. But if they don't have the right form because of their genetics, they're not gonna be able to absorb it.

She absolutely wanna test this. Your liver enzymes. So the liver enzymes are part of a chem screen. So when you order a chem screen, you're gonna get these liver enzymes and it's gonna tell us if your liver's overactive, maybe it's inflamed or underactive, like a fatty liver, right? Because these cause problems with cholesterol and digestion and detoxification.

And god forbid, knock on wood, you didn't get cancer, right? So alkaline fast. That measures cell growth proliferation, specifically in the bone and the liver. So we wanna really make sure that we're looking at these liver enzymes because it's gonna tell us about more organs in our system than just our liver.

Cbc, complete blood count. So this complete blood count measures our white blood cells for our immune system. And included in that, it's gonna be our platelets, right? And it's gonna be all the individual types of white blood cells, like the monocytes, the lymphocytes, the, Bezos fills. All of those different things are in that white blood cells.

So you can tell if someone has bacterial infection, a viral infection, are they having allergies? What is it that's affecting their immune? The red blood count, that's gonna be really important for the iron and the B vitamins With anemias and the hemoglobin and hematocrit, that's gonna be the oxygen carrying component of the blood and affects the iron.

That's gonna be super important to look for anemia as people who have maybe a bleeding ulcer or they have some kind of GI bleed or maybe women having heavy periods, you're gonna pick this up. Or people eating a very poor diet where they're not getting enough nutrients in their anemic. And we know, we show up in our office and this, there's a thing as a chiropractor, I never want somebody to say that chiropractic doesn't work and they go through the treatments and they're just not getting better.

there's gotta be a deeper answer. And so if they're anemic, if they're having some of these deficiencies, you gotta look at it because it's.

We had a little technical difficulty. We had a little problem there. So we're back though. Thank you for staying with us. Computers, you gotta love 'em. So we were just talking about deficiencies. and with the B12 and folic acid. Now we're gonna talk about vitamin D, coq 10, and magnesium.

So vitamin D is super, super important for a musculoskeletal system. Your brain, your heart, your immune system. So many things. And people finally, during covid started to wake up to see how important vitamin D is. We've been testing on our patients for close to 20 years, and we like our ranges to be between 60 and.

so it's super, super important to have plenty of vitamin D, but people will just take vitamin D and not know how much they need and they're just guessing and you can take too much, just like you can take too little. So you need to test it and know where you are and dose appropriately. Coq 10. It's great for heart and anti-aging and fertility, and gives us good.

We wanna take a look at that. It's good. For patients who are taking statins, god forbid they have musculoskeletal eggs and pains from taking statins of Coca 10 can offset that side effect. Magnesium. Magnesium is super important for our brain, our nervous system, our muscle, our heart. There's all different types of magnesium, but you can measure it in the blood to see if that patient's having adequate.

And I can tell you just from doing thousands and thousands of blood, . Everybody I test, if they're not eating an adequate, healthy diet, if they're not taking quality supplements, they're deficient in these things and you see them. All right, so how about essential fatty acids? Did you know that you can measure your essential fatty acids?

You can measure. , your Omega three s and your EPA and d h A, the parts of the omega three s as well as the mono unsaturated fats and the a, a, the good fats to see which one you need more. So people who have a l d a bad cholesterol problem, they need more EPA of the omega three s. And they don't need the D H A, the d h A.

We use a lot with kids with brain function, things like that. But how are you gonna know? How are you gonna know what to dose? How you know what to give somebody unless you're checking? So what measures get managed? So you wanna know the numbers. . All right, so on the next one is genetics, right? So there's two tests that we test and we have millions of genes, but we only test the ones that we can really make a difference in and it can change that affect these chronic diseases.

One's called M T H F R and it's methyltetrahydrofolate reductase. and this one controls methylation and it helps us convert folic acid to folate. And so even if somebody is taking a supplement that has folic acid in it, if they have this enzyme or this gene that they can't convert it, they're not gonna be able to utilize it in their homocysteine.

Another blood level is gonna elevate and that can cause a heart attack not linked to lipids. So it's super, I. This MT. H F R affects a brain. It affects a heart. It can affect clotting, it can affect memory, so many things, but it's super easy to fix by doing a methylated quad folate. But first by knowing if they have it or not.

A oe, this tells us about risk for heart disease and Alzheimer's and diabetes, and it helps us with nutrigenomics on how to eat right. So there's three different types. I'll just give you a quick overview. We have other seminars that we do where we have, go way deep into this. So there's a three, there's a four, and there's a two.

These are the most common types. There's a couple little small variants that are super rare, but for the most part, these are the common types. So 65% of the population are threes, and I call 'em bears. And the reason is they're not hardwired with this one gene to get diabetes or a. or to get diabetes. So when we look at them, we want them to eat the omnivore, where they're gonna have balance between protein, fats, and complex carbohydrates.

Now, people who have a three four in this APOE gene, they're gonna be more susceptible to heart disease. So I call 'em a deer because they need to eat more plant-based. So if you have more heart disease, if you have Alzheimer's in your family, plant-based is gonna be the way to go. Now, only 10% of the population are tigers are a two three, and so they're gonna be more susceptible to bi diabetes.

They're gonna need a higher quantity of protein in fats and less complex carbohydrates. And there's so many trends in diets all the time from every different thing you name and someone reads a book, but how do you know what you really need? I have some friends who are eating keto and doing all kinds of crazy things and ended up that they were a deer and got some heart disease and some pretty bad stuff.

So we wanna make sure that you're eating for your jeans. , the MT. H F R that we talked about is linked to 40 different diseases and 30% of the population have two of these genes, which makes it a significant finding. And 40% have one gene. So 70% of the population has this. Do you agree we should be testing for this?

And it's super simple to do with nutrition and lifestyle. So we definitely wanna make sure, because it affects their nervous system as chiropractors, that's what we care. . So there's a dangerous belief that nothing can be done, right? Oh, there's nothing you can do about it. We hear it all the time, but I'm here to tell you that's wrong because there's absolutely, if you measure these things and you find out what it is that each individual needs, You can make the changes and you can educate them to be able to make those changes.

So that's it for today. If you wanna learn more, I'm Dr. Julie McLaughlin from Vital Health Protocols. And you can see our [email protected]. And of course we have to thank ChiroSecure because they are just awesome. So thank you so much and we'll see you next time on Empowering.

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