Foundations : What do you do when every test is “normal” but you don’t feel normal?

You’re listening to Dr. Martha Reid at Doctor’s Choice Integrative Medicine in Downtown Vancouver, a space where I bring passion, inspiration and nourishment to the conversation of your health.

So, one of my patients came the other day and said to me, you know, Dr. Reid, I’m not feeling well at all. And I got a whole bunch of tests run and they’ve all come back completely normal. But I don’t feel normal and I don’t know what to do. And I said, Yeah, you know what? I totally I hear you, I hear you. And that’s a really difficult spot to be in knowing that what’s going on inside of our bodies doesn’t feel OK. But then when we run the battery of tests and despite the incredibleness of the diagnostic tools that we have and I am so grateful we have them, but they’re not always as sensitive as our bodies need them to be. So sometimes our health conditions kind of fly under the diagnostic radar, so to speak. But that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. That doesn’t mean that the experience you’re having is invalid. What it may mean is that because we don’t have a clear diagnosis, which then in many cases, a clear diagnosis gives us a very clear framework for how to approach what’s going on. But just because we don’t have that doesn’t mean we can’t do something to have you feeling better. And so how do we how do we approach this? And I said, Well, how I approach that is that I, instead of looking for disease, I look for signs of health in your body. I flip it around and I look for the signs of health. What is your body telling us?

So I operate from some very basic premises that I’ve distilled down to make sense of the incredible complexity that is the body so that I can, to my best ability, understand the picture that your body is presenting me. Because the way I look at it, when we don’t have clear, definitive diagnostic markers, the signs and the symptoms of the body are to me, like stars in a constellation that we have yet to understand how to identify.

So, for example, I was teaching my my older boy this past summer when we were camping, which is one of our great, great loves. And I love camping in the middle as best as I can the middle of nowhere. I’m an old farm kid and big, big, wide starry skies and dark dark nights. Speak to me in a really profound way, so I really like to camp in those environments. So we wrote. And my oldest boy and I were stargazing, and I was teaching him about Orion. And so he very quickly was able to get these sort of pivotal outer stars, right? The two shoulder stars and then the two ft stars. But there’s a whole lot more. There’s the belt, there’s the dagger, there’s the head. But when you can’t see all of those other pieces, it’s hard to define it as Orion. But regardless, that’s that’s what we did. We looked for it.

And so when I’m looking at patients and I’m looking at signs and symptoms that aren’t super clear in terms of a diagnosis, I kind of revert to that looking for stargazing. So I look for the signs of health that the body is telling me. And what are the messengers messages of these symptoms? So the first tenant I go to is I work from the premise that the body is self-healing. It knows how to be well, it is its blueprint. It is its innate ability is to heal itself and organize itself. And this is really easily seen by a simple cut you cut yourself by accident. And if it’s not deep enough that you require stitches, you just wash it and get out of the way. He might put some polysporin on it or tea tree oil if that’s your choice or lavender, but you get out of the way and it heals, you’re not telling the cells of your skin how to align themselves. They do that. Right. Even if you needed stitches. So the stitches bring the the wound to closure. But that’s not what seals the cells back together. Your body does that because it knows how to do that.

So when I operate from that place that the body knows how to be well and if it’s not being well, it’s not getting the tools it needs to do its job. So then the question is, well, what are the tools that my body needs to be? Well? Well, the vast majority of tools for our bodies to be well are nutrients, nutrients within food. So that old addage “you are what you eat.” Your food builds your body. And if you want a good, solid body structure, a healthful body structure, you got to eat the right foods for you. And I say the right foods for you because there’s no right diet or food relationship is defined by so many factors, right? It’s defined by our families of origin are cultures for some of us, our religion, our heritage, marketing, taste, texture, emotions, right? Body image. There’s so much that impacts our relationship to food. So we need to eat the food that is right for us involving this whole complex relationship to food. And then that begs, well, am I digesting and absorbing the nutrients? So let’s say that you’ve got the right food for your body, but your body is still presenting with these signs and symptoms of imbalance or illness or pain or inflammation. What’s going on? You got the right food. Well, then it’s perhaps that you’re not digesting and absorbing it because our nutrients come across the gut, right? The gut delivers the tools to the job site for your body to do its work of being well. So if the body’s not well, you might not have the right tools, which means that you might not have the right nutrients on the plate or that you’re not digesting and absorbing them, or if you are eating those foods. Perhaps there’s something affecting the supply line shutting down the gut.

So this brings me to the third tenet that stress negatively impacts the supply line of nutrients into the body. If we’re firing, our stress response doesn’t really matter how little how big saber tooth tiger warring tribe negative thought coffee. The wrong food doesn’t matter. Stress is stress from the body’s point of view, and that has a negative impact on the function of our digestive system to break down our food and deliver it across the gut membrane, i.e. absorption into the body so that the tools are in the toolbox at the job site for whatever tissues need them to do their work. Now, let’s assume that all of those things are happening. OK, let’s assume. All right. Number one, the body knows. How do we well? But number two, you’ve got the nutrients. Number three, you’re actually absorbing them correctly and you’re still not seeing the changes and the stress is managed and you’re still not seeing the changes. So those four things are in place and you’re not getting anywhere. What else might it be?

Perhaps. And this is the fifth tenet of what I perceive as how the body functions. The fifth tenet is that perhaps there’s an obstacle to the tool being used at the job site. So let’s say, for example, you decide to go to work and you’ve got your fob key and you get into the elevator and the fob doesn’t work well. Maybe they change the fobs and nobody gave you one. Well, you can’t arrive at the job site or what if you’re a builder and you get there? And now there’s security gates and checks and balances that you can’t get through. You’ve you’ve arrived. You’re on time with the tools in the toolbox ready to roll. And there’s something blocking you from opening that gate.

Well, this arena is to do with toxins inside the body, and toxins aren’t always what we sort of typically think, you know, drinking or drugging or smoking or, you know, toxins can be pesticides. Herbicides on our food. Toxins can be chemicals that are in our cleaning products, in our homes that we either inhale or we absorb through our skin. Toxins can be in the cosmetics that we put on our bodies. Talk. Sins can be in the form of overprotective stress hormone production or immune mediators or inflammatory cytokines that aren’t being resolved in the body. So toxins can take many, many different forms, and a toxin can be like a block on a door handle. You try to stick the key in the lock. You got the right key. The lock is there, but there’s something blocking the lock. You want the key to work. Remove the obstacle. So in this case, what I’ll do with my patients is we’ll look at detoxification and there are many, many ways to do that, and that’s a whole other conversation.

But at the end of the day, when you’re not feeling great and you don’t have a clear path, that doesn’t mean you’re stuck feeling crummy, there is room to move. Focus on the fact that your body innately knows how to be. Well, ensure that you’re giving it the tools to do what it needs to do. Make sure that there aren’t obstacles for your cells receiving those tools. So check in to stress. Check in to toxic load in the body. You know, all of those sorts of things.

So if any of you are dealing with this sort of situation, I know I certainly have. That’s one of the reasons I sit in the seat as a naturopathic doctor. My road health wise wasn’t always easy, so I had to look outside the box to resolve certain things for myself. And so if you were in that position, please come down to the clinic, have a conversation with me. I’d love to hear from you because it might not be as unattainable as you think. Before you realize it, you might be seeing all the stars in that constellation and from then on in. You never miss Orion again.

Thank you so much for spending this time with me and joining this conversation, if any of the things that you’ve heard today have landed with you moved, you resonated with you and you’d like to pipe in. I would sure love to hear from you. Some of the best conversations happen right in the medicine house with me and the easiest way to do that. Pop over to the website doctorschoiceintegrative.com. Book a discovery conversation with me. It’s called a discovery call, and it’s a complimentary 15 minute slot where we can explore health together. I’d love to do that with you. Hope to see you there.