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This newsletter is a report about what I am learning in my Blood Chemistry seminar.
January 20,2013
What's in your blood?
Hi ,
Well here it is, Friday night sitting alone in my room at the Vagabond Inn listening to the planes take off and land at San Francisco airport. I have spent the day learning about the fine points of the many kinds of anemia. I am at a three day seminar on blood chemistry tuning my skills at interpreting blood lab work. I have been studying a lot of functional medicine over the last few years to add a whole new and greater depth to the services I can provide my patients.
There is no greater way to get as much information for so little money than with a blood test. Complex and complete history taking provides a lot of information, but blood work gives us an up to the minute snapshot of just how the body is functioning at this minute. But learning how to read lab work is an art that most doctors never learn more than the basics with. The patterns of results are amazing.
Functional medicine takes this whole skill set and amps it up to a whole new level. Normal lab work only looks for results that show up once an obvious disease has set in. Functional medicine looks for patterns of imbalances before disease has taken hold in order to support the body back to health before sickness sets in.
A good example used by the instructor today was - imagine you are watching your child play in the front yard. You live on a busy street and do not want the child to go into the street and get run over, so you watch the child. Now you see the child start to chase a ball towards the street. As long as the child does not go into the street it will be safe, but you see the child heading for the street trying to catch the ball. Do you just sit there and wait until the child actually steps into the street where it will not be safe, or do you do something to stop the child before it gets to the street. Standard  medicine would say that there is nothing to worry about until the child actually goes into the street (or your lab values actually go into the danger zone.) Functional medicine says you can see the obvious patterns and trends and intercept the child before it goes into the street (or you actually get sick.)
Everything in the body operates in a priority. We spent so much time today on anemias because getting oxygen to the cells and how the body manages iron is the number one priority in the body. If you are not getting oxygen to the right places all the time, nothing else matters - you die. Besides, oxygen is used in the production of the energy the body uses to do everything. So nothing else will work right in your body if you have anemia anyway, so there is no point in looking at anything else until any anemia is addressed first.
One of the reasons I am more excited about doing lab work now than in the past is because I just got hooked up with a professional group that has arranged fantastic discount pricing on the exact same lab work that I was doing in the past occasionally. Lab work that used to cost me and my patients $300 to $400 I can now get for $130 cash. Perhaps I am too conservative, but the high price of lab work held me back from offering it to you my patients. Now that concern is greatly reduced.
For a long time my practice has been focused on emergency pain relief care. This is a good thing, but as I begin to age, I am developing a greater appreciation for stopping the degenerative diseases of aging before I become incapacitated by arthritis, diabetes, heart disease, and all the rest. I want to catch my body well before it goes "into the street" and gets hit by one of these "cars". The idea of having a stroke, or a brain dysfunction, or needing a hip replacement, or anything else doesn't appeal to me. So naturally I start to view my patients in this same way.
So I am developing more of a proactive and preventative viewpoint on health than just pain management. Of course we all want the pain to go away when it visits. But as we all get older, it is taking more and more to accomplish this. Building health from the inside out and doing what is necessary to maintain that health is the only long term answer. So expect me to be writing about and offering more health building and prevention opportunities at the office.
In addition to offering functional medicine based lab work, I am building a physical therapy area at the office for tissue rehabilitation and muscle retraining. I will be offering more opportunities for nutritional evaluations and recommending more health preserving nutrients to you.
Your job will be to feel what parts of these new offerings are right for you to engage now and which are right at some later date. I am engaging these lifestyle changes in my own life because I want to feel good as I get older. Being put on 10 different medications for degenerative diseases that I could prevent by taking the right steps now is just plain wrong to me. I want to stay on the lawn and play safely, not wait till after I have been hit by a couple cars and hope the docs can kind of put me back together.
Take care,
David
We have moved
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Our new address is at 9725 Fair Oaks Blvd.
If you are coming from the Roseville area you could come down Sunrise Blvd, but that is a long trek. It is probably shorter time wise to come down Auburn Blvd - San Juan Ave like you have been for the Sunset
office, but instead of turning left at Sunset, keep going straight 3
more lights to Fair Oaks Blvd and turn left. Go down 2 lights to New York Ave, go through the intersection, and immediately turn into the turn lane once the center divider ends. We are on the left.
We are looking forward to seeing all of you at our new location.
And Thanks again to all the wonderful folks that came and helped us move!
Take care,
David
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