One of my pet peeves is understanding what is the most important thing to test for. A lot of practitioners today are still testing for secondary issues rather than causation issues. What do I mean by that? Well, consider testing gut bacteria, and then you get the results back in, that your gut balance is off. The key question here is WHY - why is my gut flora off? Often we do not address that, rather we just start some anti-fungals for candida and some probiotics to restore healthy gut. This offers relief in the short term, but more often than not, people get all their symptoms back, whenever they stray an inch off the “restrictive anti-candida diet”.
Here is an example of a client dealing with multiple issues incl. digestive disorders. The source of her symptoms turned out to be an acute chemical poisoning which typically stem from contaminated drinking water. The minute she added a shower and drinking water filter, she felt slightly better. And after some months of removing the chemicals in her body, her symptoms disappeared altogether. Now it still took approx. 8 months for the levels to go into an acceptable range, yet her symptoms went down earlier than that, fortunately.
A snapshot of some of the acute toxicity players involved in client case - chemicals from contaminated drinking water. Note that the numbers far exceed the scale!
And after approx. 8 months levels are close to acceptable, symptoms gone.
We always need to ask enough “whys” that there cannot be asked anymore “whys” - this is the true indicator of whether we are testing and treating symptoms or causes.
Thus the next question to ask when you have agressive gut flora is indeed “WHY” - and that could turn out to be something as simple as chemicals as above or heavy metal poisoning. And then the next question is still “why do I have heavy metal poisoning?”. This could be many things and would require obviously an in-depth lifestyle analysis to figure out the source, which could be work-related (lead poisoning is an issue in many “men’s work” areas i.e. mechanics). It could also be something like mercury fillings or lead from old water pipes getting into our drinking water.
The exposure needs to be identified and stopped so proper treatment can begin.
This is why it is imperative to get properly sorted out prior to beginning any treatment.
If we skip on getting tested thoroughly, we often find ourselves stuck in symptom-management, which becomes even more expensive with time, ironically.
Or of we indeed do go through testing, but only test for secondary issues (shallow surface markers) - gut balance, mitochondrial functioning, ATP, inflammation, cholesterol, liver and kidney, crp, homocysteine, hormones or blood sugar (can also be a causative factor if simply due to crappy eating habits obviously, but did you know that mercury toxicity is linked to diabetes-2 and blood sugar issues? Yes, that means cutting out carbs or whatever the current diet trend is won’t do much in the long run, if there is something else affecting blood sugar regulation - “CUT OUT CARBS” “NO! CUT OUT MEAT AND FAT!” omg this gets real old, real fast - any practitioner who adheres to one-size-fits-all, well, it is just embarrassing and creates division in the health debate). Now with regards to hormones, sometimes hormones can be the cause alone. However, it is critical to evaluate whether it is not just hormones but rather hormone-disrupting substances that needs to be addressed, so the body can get back to its own balance. Obviously it makes a lot more sense to remove something like mold poisoning (if that turns out to be the case), which is related to estrogen-dominance, rather than focusing on estrogen-dominance itself, which can be merely a symptom of mold poisoning.
When it comes to testing we want to test for upstream factors and not downstream (trickle down effects).
And the easiest way to ensure we are doing that is continue asking “why” until there are no more whys to ask.