It’s official, I have finished level 2 of my Integrative Health Practitioner certifications!
I’ve had a lot of questions as to what functional medicine labs I will be able to offer clients now.
The 7 labs are Food Sensitivity Testing, Parasite and Bacteria Testing, Organic Acid Testing, Omega-3 testing, Adrenal Hormone Testing, Thyroid Adrenal Hormone Testing, and a Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis test. Awesome right?!
You may have never heard of some of these so in this episode, I run through what they are and why you might consider them.
Remember to share this episode if this helped you today and tag me on Instagram at @simplyhealthykacey!
It’s official, I have finished level 2 of my Integrative Health Practitioner certifications!
I’ve had a lot of questions as to what functional medicine labs I will be able to offer clients now.
The 7 labs are Food Sensitivity Testing, Parasite and Bacteria Testing, Organic Acid Testing, Omega-3 testing, Adrenal Hormone Testing, Thyroid Adrenal Hormone Testing, and a Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis test. Awesome right?!
You may have never heard of some of these so in this episode, I run through what they are and why you might consider them.
Remember to share this episode if this helped you today and tag me on Instagram at @simplyhealthykacey!
[00:10] Kacey K: Welcome to the Simply Healthy You podcast, your place for overcoming overwhelm with your health to reach your fullest potential. I'm your host, Casey Canaan. I am so pumped to have you here. I am a recovering, burnt out high achiever who is diagnosed with an autoimmune thyroid aid condition by my early thirty s. I didn't realize that running myself ragged in the name of being superwoman and determined to achieve all the things in life was killing my body. I created this podcast so that you don't have to continue the struggle like I did for over a decade. I sat down, studied the data, and simplified what it means to prioritize your own health needs so that you can be the best for all the things on your to do.
[00:50] Kacey K: List.
[00:50] Kacey K: Everything you hear on this podcast, I have tested and implemented in my own super pact, life with my family to bring you the tips, tools, and strategies that will keep your life simply healthy.
[01:06] Kacey K: Hello friend. Welcome to another episode of the simply healthy you podcast. I'm so grateful to be infiltrating your brain with today's topic. My name is Casey Kane. I'm an integrative health practitioner and certified holistic nutritionist with a Master's in Psychology and I'm here to bring you science based conversations to help you live a healthier and happier life. You may notice the sound quality is a little bit different today. I am trying something new in an effort to try to record video while I'm recording the audio for these podcasts. In the future, I'm recording back in my office again, but it's kind of echoey. There's not a lot in here to absorb the sound. I'm working on it, so please bear with me. I am hoping that my family will not interrupt me and you may hear some noises in the background. I'm going to do my best. I appreciate your patience with this. In the meantime, I still have yet to build a door on my office and yeah, we've been in this house for a year and a half now, but that is the story for a different day. Today I want to talk about it's official. I have finished level two of my Integrative Health practitioner certifications. Yay. I know. I've been talking about this for a while. I mean, I started these in January. I got my $3 million liability insurance policy. Yeah, crazy. I didn't have to pay $3 million. I don't have $3 million. It only cost me a few hundred dollars. But that's the liability insurance that I need to have. I'm getting the shopping link ready for clients because you get them at a slightly discounted rate through me versus through the company's regular website. And the final piece of paper is coming in the mail, but I printed it out already and took a picture with it because I'm just so darn excited about it. Hundreds of hours, thousands of pages of slides, notes, handouts case studies, protocols, I have bought more reams of paper and ink cartridges for my little at home printer in the past five months than I have in years. That thing got some work. I started these in January and fast tracked myself to finishing this in May when normally they told me it takes about six to twelve months to finish both levels of this certification. I've been spending every single morning, seven days a week before my kids get up to get this done. It helps that I absolutely love learning this stuff and I also had an excellent educational foundation through previous certifications and degrees that really allowed me to work through some of these parts pretty quickly. Still though, I did learn a ton of nuance to the optimizing health journey and so many amazing modalities that I get to combine in order to serve clients best. I learned about functional medicine, ayurveda Chinese medicine and herbalism orthomolecular medicine, bioregulatory medicine, traditional naturopathy and Eastern philosophy. I mean, it was so freaking cool. I highly recommend this certification if you are interested in this field of work. And I think with my referral link you could even get a discount if you decide to do it. So just reach out. I'm happy to talk more about these certifications almost at the same time as finishing this certification. My husband lost his job. Yes, if you are on my email list, you got that email already. They were actually threatening his job for a couple of months, so we've had some time to prepare for the worst, although we were kind of hoping it wouldn't happen. Obviously it was becoming increasingly toxic, like an increasingly toxic environment. So this is definitely for the better. But in the meantime, we may have to dip into our emergency savings while we're in limbo. And he has been actively pursuing a new job. Just nothing has quite worked out yet. The right one has not popped up for him. But this is a huge opportunity for me to be able to serve more. If you've been around for a while, you know, I run my business part time, I didn't want to run it full time. I have my mother who lives with us, who serves as a childcare provider for us three mornings a week while I do my work. And I don't want to work 4 hours a week because I love the time I'm getting to be with my kids, especially at this age. But I have definitely longed for more hours recently to be able to serve more women in different ways. I love learning and I love being able to expand my services to help others learn as well. And I think on this health journey, when there is so much nuance to the conversation and there's so much bullshit information out there, I want to be able to put the information that I know works well and helps support bodies best. I want to put that out there as much as fucking possible. So I've had this longing and perhaps the universe listened. And this wasn't quite the way that we expected this to pan out. Of course it would have been nice to just have more hours, right? But that's not how life works. That's not how life works. And in a way, this is just the ultimate flexibility, right? We're trying to look at this situation as a unique opportunity to gain flexibility of time. Really, it's something that's always so hard for all of us. There's only a finite amount of time in every single day. And you can't make more of it, right? You never have enough of it and you can't make more of it. So we're obviously focusing on taking care of ourselves through this stressful time while also looking at the ways in which we can serve others. We have our other produce farming that we've started exploring this year and trying to grow, looking at serving each other better and strengthening our family. Because when we're always so go go, sometimes those kinds of things get lost. And we're also trying to take time for ourselves as individuals. Between me and my husband, we haven't had a lot of time for that. With small kids and everything else, it's definitely hard and we've taken on a lot of projects willingly, but we're trying to make sure we also take some time for ourselves. So here we are. Functional lab test. That's where we are now. That's where all of this has led us to. I've had a lot of questions as to what functional medicine labs I'll be able to offer clients. And while I was planning on going through each one each week on the podcast, that's going to take a while. So I'm recording this quick summary so you can start to look into what these tests might provide you for answers to imbalances that you might be experiencing in your body. So the seven labs that I will be able to offer are food sensitivity testing, which I have already talked about on the podcast, parasite and bacteria testing, organic acid testing, omega three testing, adrenal hormone testing, thyroid adrenal hormone testing, and a hair tissue mineral analysis test. Awesome, right? So awesome. Now the names are slightly different. The company that I'm partnering with is Equalife and the names will be slightly different on their website. But essentially these are the functional labs at the heart of what it is that they're doing. There's a lot of you got to change names for things when it's offered by a different company. All that kind of bullshit sort of thing with copyrights and all of that. But essentially these are the seven functional labs here. And with all of these you could really, I mean, just such a comprehensive I can't wait to run so many of these on myself and my family. You may have never heard of some of these though, so I really want to run through them here, tell you a little bit about what they're for and why you might consider them. Food sensitivity testing is pretty obvious and I went over that in the last two episodes in detail, so you can go back and listen to those. So let's move on to parasite and bacteria testing, which is a stool test and not the most popular as you can imagine. You might want to consider this testing if you have autoimmune issues. Bloating and reflux. Frequent loose stool or constipation skin rashes. Frequent UTIs. Allergies and asthma. Acne cystic on the back and the forehead, especially imbalance immunity and inflammation. Significant weight gain or loss. Hot flashes, especially at night. Insomnia anemia and itchy anus which could also be yeast or fungal. The test that I will be offering my clients, each lab is slightly different, but the company equalife that I partner with chooses the best of the best for each lab that we offer. We actually have no affiliation with any one lab, which I think is really cool. He decided the doctor that created this and that I learned from decided to create his company and be able to choose from the best of the best. So some of the labs that I learned about the lab tests that I learned about were offered from one lab at the beginning of the modules that I was reviewing. And then by the end there was an update because he had changed labs to run the same test because they had either better markers that were measured or just easier to read or something like that. So I think that's pretty cool. So the test that I will be offering my clients mainly looks for parasites like worms and gut bugs along with their eggs, h, pylori, bacteria, yeast or fungi, bacterial overgrowth and occult blood which shows damage to the intestines. The situations where stool testing would be the best approach because some of these are better looked at in the organic acids test or the oat which I'll talk about in a minute, are bloating upon waking forehead or back. Acne being underweight and can't gain itchy anus, especially at night. Diarrhea multiple times per day. Hot flashes for nonmenopausal women, especially at night. Chronic immune dysfunction and blood in the stool or dark black stool. So really, if you've got some of those glaring symptoms, stool testing might be the best approach for you. Otherwise I'm going to talk about the organic acids next that I think would be a better fit. If you suspect something like yeast or bacterial overgrowth in other ways, I think if you're thinking parasites or some kind of intestinal damage, then stool test would be the one. Otherwise I think that the organic acids test would probably be better. The stool test that will be offered is a multi collection day test which is super important so you can actually catch what it is that you are looking for. I know it doesn't sound sexy at all, but it's effective. You don't want a one day stool test because there is a good chance that you could miss what is going on there. So this is the most effective way to have a multi collection day test, and that's what we want when we're spending money on this testing. The stool test is not the most affordable, so if you're needing it, you want to make sure that it is the best test available. If those don't apply to you. But some of the symptoms still resonated with that. I said earlier, the Oat might actually be a better test for you. The organic acids test that is made up of 75 plus main biomarkers in twelve different sections. It's super comprehensive and will probably be one of the tests I recommend the most, because I think every single person should probably run this test. There are so much information you can gain from it. Many of the biomarkers on this test are near impossible to test at a lab facility through blood, which is what makes the organic acid test such an amazing test, because we're not looking for the markers themselves, but rather the waste or metabolites that the thing leaves behind. So we're looking at acids or waste, substrates and toxicities. This can ultimately show us deficiencies in enzymes or breakdowns in metabolic pathways. This is why this is so powerful. Like I said, really, everyone should run this test to see their overall status. Because we can see yeast, fungi, mold, bacterial overgrowth, oxalate issues, energy metabolism, neurotransmitter, metabolites, vitamin C, B complex, coq, ten, NAC, biotin and Folate metabolism, glutathione production, ketones, fatty acids, amino acid breakdown and phosphoric acid, which relates to calcium, magnesium, potassium and vitamin D. Yeah, right. So comprehensive. Such a good one and really not that expensive. This is a pretty affordable test. I realize it's relative, but I do think that we're looking at all the functional labs. This is not the most expensive one, and you would think so with all the biomarkers that attest. It's a urine test, so super easy to do. Everyone would benefit. But the people who need this the most are those experiencing bloating or digestive issues, gas burping, brain fog, muscle weakness, inflammation and joint pain, skin rashes, autoimmune issues, memory issues, headaches, mood imbalances, learning or focus issues, poor growth in younger people, and other unexplained health issues. These can be run on children as well. So, I mean, again, that's a pretty comprehensive test. That little blurb there that I just did does not do it justice. But I think you could see how amazing the information could be from that test. After that monster test, there is omega three testing that I will have available, which was totally new to me, and I didn't really see the importance of it until I learned more about how your omega ratio plays a big role in inflammation and how this test can help with that. Many of these tests do offer ways to measure inflammation, but this one is very specific. If you suffer from cardiovascular issues, high cholesterol, high triglycerides, dry, flaking, skin joint pain, arthritis, allergies and asthma, mood disorders, learning disabilities, weight gain, Acne, imbalanced, immunity, female hormone imbalances, PMS symptoms, vision issues, bed wetting and inflammatory diseases, the omega three test could be a very good idea for you. And it's very simple and straightforward, so it also makes it lower in price. Like I said, there's a fairly simple test, but it can tell us a lot. And it is fairly simple to restore balance. It's usually just like, let's take an omega three supplement because most of us aren't getting enough in our diet. In a good ratio, you really need to be eating certain kinds of fish at least four times a week to have your omega three ratio be well on its own. Next up is the adrenal hormone test, and this is going to give you all the info on your cortisol and anabolic hormones. The impacts of stress on your body will be clear in this lab. This is going to be a very powerful lab if you are suffering from fatigue, brain fog, low libido, anxiety, depression, PTSD, other mood related issues, Acne, PMS symptoms, water retention, weight gain or loss issues, insomnia, heart palpitations, poor recovery, frequent illness, difficulty gaining muscle, chronic inflammation, and aging related issues. This one will be for you. This one will be helpful for a lot of women, honestly, because of the sheer amount of stress we are usually under. And if not this, then the next one, really, hopefully the next one that I'll tell you about, which also throws in the thyroid and a few other markers because that is just so common for women to have thyroid issues. This lab looks at the hypothalamus pituitary axis or HPA axis, and this is where we see things like Cushing's disease, Addison's disease, and Adrenal insufficiency. Now, I do not diagnose or treat disease, but this is where you might see some of the markers of those diseases show up on a test like this. This is also where adrenal fatigue can be seen. And one thing I learned and why there is such contention over the term adrenal fatigue is that it's kind of a misnomer. Now, I have podcast episodes about adrenal fatigue. I have called it adrenal fatigue many times, but I learned really the more accurate term would be HPA access dysfunction or maladaptation or something like hypocortis cortisol ism, or adrenal insufficiency. The doctor that I learned from said it's a technicality that he doesn't care if people use it. Like he's not going to jump down someone's throat for saying adrenal fatigue because he understands what they mean by it. But that's one of the reasons he said that in the conventional medical community, not recognizing adrenal fatigue is an actual thing. Because if you were to go to a typical Western medicine doctor, they're probably going to tell you that you're full of shit and there's no such thing as adrenal fatigue. And part of that is a technicality. Like, that's not the proper name to call it. What it comes down to, though, is there are multiple pathways for cortisol in your body. And when you're in a chronic state of stress, those cortisol pathways matter and can easily be overloaded in certain directions, taking production away from your sex hormones like progesterone, and causing you to become catabolic in the process. What all this means is that your body is going to start breaking down and we see many people in the medical community just attributing this to the aging process. This just happens as we get older, and especially as women, especially after menopause. All that fucking bullshit, right? And that's not the truth. The truth is there are actually seven stages of adrenal maladaptation, and if we can see exactly where you are in that process, we can support the body in coming out of it. Like, we can fix it, the body can recover. The stages go from the initial alarm stages, which are your emergency response to stress. But when that doesn't go away, which happens for a lot of us when we're in chronic stress, you end up going next into the resistance stages and could eventually hit the exhaustion stages. How quickly your body fails depends on the level of stress, number of stressors, genetic predisposition. While we can't do anything about the genetic predisposition piece, we can limit how much your genetics are tested by controlling your diet, lifestyle environment. So this test looks at cortisol four times throughout your day to assess exactly what it's doing and whether it's rising or falling like it should, which is the primary markers that show us where you might be in that maladaptation process. What stage of alarm are you in or what stage of stress adaptation are you maladaptation are you in? So we know how to support your body at that moment. It also looks at estrodiol, which is the way that we measure estrogen. It looks at progesterone for women, it looks at the ratio of those two as well, because that is extremely important. Your estrogen to progesterone ratio. It looks at testosterone and it looks at DHEAS. All of these give us a great picture of where the imbalances are with your hormones and what stage of adrenal maladaptation you might be in. Then we have the Thyroid Adrenal Hormone Lab test, and as you might imagine, it's all the info from the last test with additional markers for thyroid insulin levels, hemoglobin, A, one C and vitamin D. Yeah, this is an entirely custom test and it's pretty freaking awesome. The doctor I learned from created this with the lab and you can't find this one anywhere else. You cannot find all of these markers in one test anywhere else. This is only on equal life, and it's just an amazing amount of information. This is likely the one I would recommend to you if we suspect hormone issues in any way because of how comprehensive it is. Now, that does make it a more expensive test. I'll be honest. This is one of the more expensive ones. It's got all the good thyroid markers in it. I talk all the time about how conventional doctors just want to test TSH. And if you've ever had a conversation about thyroid markers, you know that, like I have said many times, it is so much more than just TSH. It's so hard to get them to measure anything else. But women are seven times more likely to develop thyroid disease than men, and one in eight women will develop some kind of disease. The American Thyroid Association estimates that 60% of people are unaware of their thyroid imbalances and subclinical thyroid imbalances are more prevalent than the actual disease state. So that's what this test is going to pick up on. We are not waiting for you to be so far out of balance that you can get a clinical diagnosis. Fuck that shit. Who wants to wait for that? If you are having trouble sleeping tiredness and fatigue difficulty concentrating dry skin and hair depression sensitivity to cold temperature frequent heavy periods possible infertility joint and muscle pain high cholesterol, hoarseness of voice inability to lose weight low stamina and energy low libido, anxiety, irritability or moodiness nervousness, hyperactivity, sweating, sensitivity to high temperatures hand trembling, hair loss, mist or light menstrual periods this runs the gamut because you could have hypothyroid issues meaning too little thyroid production. Or you could have, on the opposite side of the spectrum, hyperthyroid, which is too much thyroid production. I mostly see hypo with women too little because of how bogged down that our system gets. And that's where you're going to see a lot of those first chunk of symptoms that I mentioned there. This is a big test and like I said, definitely one of the more expensive ones, but absolutely worth it if you can swing it. The final lab test that I will have available is the Hair Tissue Mineral analysis. I really like this one for the data we get, and it's also pretty affordable for the HDMA. You do need to cut out some of your hair, and while it seems like a lot when you're going to look at the test, you won't even notice it if you follow the instructions. You cut little snippets from the back of your head and in a few different places, you're never even going to be able to tell. What I find so cool is that one and a half inches of your hair, with your root being the most recent, of course we're going to pull, ladies, if you have long hair, we're going to cut right at the root. So we can take the sample from the root of your hair, not from the ends of your hair. That's going to give us approximately three to four months of data. That is so cool. So cool. I mean, how can we get that much data, usually ever in one sitting? You can't. Instead of trying to test your blood for mineral levels that are always fluctuating, depending on what's going on in your body, we can see through this test what the body is excreting, so we can see exactly how much of a mineral was actually used by the body. This test also shows us heavy metals, and heavy metals are a big thing these days. They are hiding in so many different places. A lot of us have this toxicity and we don't know it, and it can cause a lot of issues. So this shows us heavy metals that are unbound and being excreted, which we know can be particularly toxic. Some heavy metals are bound and they will not show up on this test until doing a heavy metal detox. But given signs and symptoms, we can usually figure out if that is the case or if that is suspected to be the case. And we can do a heavy metal detox and then do a hair tissue mineral analysis, which might show an increase in some of those heavy metals because the body is pulling them out. Signs of mineral imbalance include high blood pressure, low blood pressure, fatigue, lightheadedness or dizziness, skin discoloration, nail discoloration like white spots, sweating too much or too little breathing, difficulty, heart, arrhythmia or palpitations, low mood or apathy, headaches, digestive issues, learning issues, allergies and asthma, and chronic inflammation. Signs of heavy metal overload include headaches, joint pain, skin inflammation like rashes, skin pigmentation abnormalities, tingling and extremities, nausea, vomiting, increased sweating, breathing difficulty, heart, arrhythmia and palpitations, chronic inflammation, and autoimmune issues. Heavy metals are huge for those of us with autoimmune issues. I can't wait to do this test on myself because I'm really interested to see if I have a heavy metal overload. I have suspected it for years, but being that I was pregnant or breastfeeding for so many years, it was not safe for me to be doing any sort of heavy metal detox. So I didn't bother testing because I couldn't do anything with the information at that time. You can see how important this test can be. Your mineral levels not only need to be optimal, you don't just need to be taking or getting the right amount every single day, but they need to be imbalanced. And that's what we can see with this test. An estimated 75% of Americans are magnesium deficient, and the majority of people severely lack calcium in their diet. This isn't just a vegan and vegetarian issue, as many will like to make it out to be. One in three americans also have high blood pressure or vascular related issues, and that is a staggering statistic right now. One in three. That's a staggering statistic. It could all be mineral imbalance, but your conventional doctor is going to put you on pharmaceuticals, right? Blood pressure medication, cholesterol medication that only try to suppress the symptoms instead of supporting the body with what it needs. So that's it. Those are the seven powerhouse tests that I can now offer you as a client. And as you can see, they will give you such a comprehensive look at the imbalances in your body that we can then correct from there. Support the body in correcting the test. Prices are set by equalife. I don't have any control over that piece of it. They work with the individual labs, like I mentioned before, to get these tests and send them out to you. So I'll be getting those onto my website soon for you to see, and then I'll be adding consultation packages as well, so I can interpret your results for you, help you set up a protocol and walk you through it, and how to implement the specific protocol and monitor symptoms and things and see what changes as we go along. Some of these things take three to six months to really see some significant changes with and working on helping to correct those imbalances in the body. And sometimes retesting will be needed. Now, you won't have to necessarily do a full retest of some of these larger tests. They do break some of them down into smaller pieces that you can do as retests just to check on the critical numbers to tell us if things are working. But we can get to all of that when we work on this together. Of course, if you're not sure which tests will be the best fit for you, I always offer free 30 minutes consultations to discuss your health. What I will probably do is have a quick inquiry form for you to fill out with some basic info so I can start to get a picture of what's going on before talking with you. You and that'll make the most of our 30 minutes together during your free consult and allow us to come up with a clear plan that you can then assess and say, okay, yes, this fits in my budget, or no, this doesn't fit in my budget. While I get this all up and running, I'm really hoping to have this done by the end of May. While I get this all up and running, check with your HSA or your FSA provider if you have one, a health savings account or a flexible spending account to see if functional at home lab tests are covered. Some companies allow it. That'll be a huge win. Not a lot, but some do. Sometimes you might have to get a referral from your doctor, like my consultations are already covered under many plans, as long as your doctor has referred you, which I know is a struggle many times because conventional doctors don't believe in what I do. I know. That can be a stretch, but it's worth a try. I am already coded in my payment system to be able to accept HSA and FSA cards, but you can let me know if your company is going to need like a super bill or any of those kinds of requirements that they might have. As far as trying to talk about all of these in one episode, I mean, this was the quickest way I could do it. There's a lot of details that I left out of these tests that I will still be going over in the coming weeks. Imagine all that can be discovered from these tests when we dive specifically into each one. I mean, really, it's amazing information. I'm so pumped to be offering this now and I cannot wait to help you discover the root causes of your issues to help your body rebalance. Thanks as always for listening and I'll catch you next time.
[26:50] Kacey K: Thank you so much for listening to.
[26:51] Kacey K: The Simply Healthy You podcast.
[26:53] Kacey K: If these episodes are resonating with you, go ahead and click that subscribe button and leave a review with all the great nuggets that you're taking away from today's episode. I promise you I read every single one of them as you're. Feedback is really valuable to me in creating future episodes. As your host, I look forward to having you join me for the next episode. But in the meantime, remember, keep it simple and eat more plants.