Episode 4 – What Testing Do You Need For Fatigue?

Shownotes We’ve all been there – you go to the doctor, they run some tests, the results come in and you are told that everything is normal. Yet, your body, you feel anything but normal. In this episode Anna talks about the difference between functional and diagnostic reference ranges, how you can get more from your blood work than what your doctor is telling you and functional testing options that she finds most useful to support her 1:1 Fatigue Recovery Clients.  Useful links: Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz What Testing Do You Need For Fatigue? Welcome back to the chronic fatigue and burnout recovery podcast. If you listen to the previous episode of the podcast, I went through the causes of fatigue generally and chronic fatigue specifically. And it was a fairly substantial episode. I think I spoke for about 30 minutes, talking through all the possible things that could be contributing to fatigue.  So today, I want to answer the question you were probably asking as you were listening to that episode: How do I know if these things are a problem for me? What I’d like to talk about today is what testing you may want to explore, investigate, ask your doctor to run, or if you’re working with a functional medicine practitioner or nutritional therapist like myself, what do you want to maybe ask them about or ask them to help you with. So what I’m going to do is just kind of run through the various tests and terms of how I do this in my practice. Different practitioners may have different perspectives, and they may do things differently.  But this is just a framework for how I work. Also, if that is something you’d like to do, if you’d like to work with me, you could also understand how we would work together to explore some of these options. So, where I like to start is to get a general big picture.  Usually, by the time clients come to me, they’ve been to the doctor, they’ve had some blood work done, they’ve been told everything is normal, or there are just one or two things that are out of balance, but nothing that’s helping them to move forward. But if that hasn’t been done, if they haven’t had any recent bloodwork done, then I would like to get some updated bloodwork, just to get a set, get a sense of the lay of the land and what’s possibly going on. So I personally really like the Well Woman Panel by Medichecks.  It’s just a nice, all-inclusive panel with some elements I want to see as I’m starting to work with a client. Specifically, things like vitamin D and C reactive protein. It includes a complete blood count, which would then give me a sense of what this person’s red blood cell health is like. Are they oxygenating adequately?  Do we need to support them with nutrients for oxygenation? It also looks at elements relating to the immune system, like the white blood cell, counts the neutrophils, the lymphocytes, and the basal fill the monocytes, eosinophils. So these are all immune molecules, which can tell if the immune system is maybe a little bit active. I also want to see an iron panel including ferritin.  So some of my clients will have low iron, and some of my clients will have very high iron. So if there’s low iron, we definitely want to support that...