ADDITIONAL SERVICES
FUNCTIONAL BLOOD CHEMISTRY
An integrative approach to restoring balance, improving health, and preventing disease.
Patients frequently bring their lab work from the doctor’s office, saying “everything is normal,” with a disgruntled look on their face because they don’t feel “normal.” Sometimes, they show up with lab work that has lots of red flags and irregularities, fearful of the further testing and prescriptions their doctor has recommended.
The Functional Blood Chemistry Review is a way to have thorough blood testing and analysis done, and then sit down with a health care provider who can explain each element and provide a useful strategy to move forward. Running comprehensive tests, instead of individual elements, shows a complete picture of how your body is behaving, instead of small fragments. Looking at the whole picture allows us to see areas to focus on with lifestyle enhancements.
Functional Medicine uses a clinical lab value range based on a healthy population of people, where “optimal health’ relative norms are identified. This range falls normally around the peak of the bell curve for standard lab values.
The optimal range is indicative of good health, where your blood chemistry markers are all in alignment with a person who is feeling well and does not have symptoms of distress.
As values creep outside the optimal range, patterns can be followed as clues to underlying conditions that may only be in the beginning stages. In this way, we can analyze someone’s condition for slight deviations away from optimal, and then use lifestyle, diet, herbs, and nutrition guidelines to steer the person back toward optimal health.
When looking at the FBC Review, we commonly find these types of subclinical disharmonies:
• Electrolyte imbalances
• Malnutrition and improper digestive function
• Endocrine disruptions
• Liver and gallbladder congestion
• Chronic immune activity
• Iron or B vitamin irregularities
• Blood sugar imbalances
• Evidence of inflammation
HERBAL MEDICINE
Although herbs have become very popular and are easy to come by these days, Chinese Herbal Medicine is a very specific type of herbal regime. By assessing the patient in all the ways we listed previously, we come up with a working diagnosis o guide our herbal strategy. In Chinese Herbal Medicine, herbs are never given as single ingredients, instead the herbs are combined in formulas that have a specific recipe of ratios, dosages, functions and directions. Like baking a cake or batch of brownies, the ingredients are combined in specific ways to create the proper chemistry of actions that will address that body, all based on the pattern of diagnosis that has been established.
Unlike heading to the local herb shop or vitamin store, these herbs are given with specific purpose in mind, a time frame of use, with a specific dose and direction for their use, which is based on the individual. At Five Points, we emphasize the proper use of herbal medicine and consider it one of our unique features, as we are the only Chinese Medicine clinic in town that features a complete raw herb pharmacy to create our custom, and signature, “Teas.”
By using this custom herbal approach we are able to meet the patient where they are at every appointment and provide a signature formula to fit their current pattern or needs. Patent pill formulas are available for those patients who are unable to drink the teas, but we maintain a stock of around 200 formulas to choose from, so that we are still able to offer a custom approach.
Integrating Herbal Medicine into the treatment plan allows the practitioner to work on the underlying patterns of disharmony, which can create rapid improvements, faster than acupuncture alone. By supporting the constitutional nature of the patient, we provide more vital Qi and Blood flow support to make the acupuncture more effective.