Greetings.
Eric Bakker, naturopath.
Thanks for coming back and looking at my video.
I often get asked by people, "What are the right kind of tests I should get performed
by my doctor?
How can I monitor my health on a regular basis?
What are the most important things to look for?
What do I ask my doctor for or, failing that, what can I actually order myself so I can
self-assess?"
Remember this important thing, the most important person in your life is you.
Okay?
Your health is more important to you than your health is important to your doctor.
All right?
Sounds really awful saying that, but that's the truth of the matter.
Really, I mean your health is your probably ... well, in my opinion, your greatest asset.
It should be greater than your car.
It should be greater than your house.
It should be greater than your fish tank or whatever you've got turns you on.
Health is the number-one asset you've got so, therefore, you want to monitor it to the
max and make sure that everything is running really, really well.
I'll bet you that you get your car checked and tested and serviced more regularly than
you would your own body, and yet you're probably going to dump your car in a few years and
get another one.
Well, I've got bad news for you.
You can't dump your body and get another one, not yet anyway.
What are the best tests to do?
Let's talk about that.
To start with, let's talk about medical tests that the medical doctor's going to do.
I think we'll have to make a separate video on the best functional medicine tests.
These are the tests that your primary medical doctor will not do.
They're not interested, really, in the function of the body.
They're more interested in the disease of the body, so a lot of these tests are performed,
really, to see what kind of illness or sickness you have so then they can correct that sickness
or illness, but a lot of these tests are really good for you to get done regularly to monitor
the state of your health so you don't get sick in the first place.
Okay?
Many people I see get sick because they have something lacking in their diet.
They're either too stressed, or they don't eat the wrong kind of food, or they're lacking
something to confer good health.
A lot of these markers we're going to talk about will actually point you in the right
direction to what needs fixing up.It's incredible how many people I've blood tested over the
years that haven't had a test for a long time, and we find some amazing things, and other
people where I've tested, they get tested all the time, but they don't get tested for
particular types of markers.
I've spent a lot of time looking at websites and blogs and looking at people's recommendations
for tests, but most of these people have got no working knowledge of the tests.
They don't regularly get them done on patients, and they haven't got the span of experience
and the decades that I have in seeing the cause and effect of these markers.
I've learnt what are the most special markers, really, that you can look for.
These are specialty markers, markers I don't generally see other people recommending.
For example, one called homocysteine, which I started to really understand and look for
over 25 years ago when nobody really tested for it.
I'll talk more about that later.
I've broken the blood testing into different categories, okay, so lipids, like fats in
the blood, cholesterol, things like that, inflammatory markers, blood sugar markers,
thyroid markers, kidney markers, and liver markers, and then miscellaneous, particularly
B12 and vitamin D, and also the homocysteine.
I might put that one under that category.
Then, also, we've got a CBC or a complete blood count at the end, which is just basic
stuff.
Let's start with the lipids.
Many people worry with fats in the blood, for example, HDL, the good fats, low LDL,
low-density lipoprotein, which are supposedly the bad fats, and also triglycerides, which
are a type of fat influenced more by sugar or carbohydrates in the diet.
The lipid studies are quite important, especially as you get older, but I've been to too many
seminars and conferences and heard expert doctors say that many people who die of heart
disease have got quite a normal blood lipid profile.
About 50% of people who have heart attacks, for example, don't have elevated cholesterol,
so don't let the doctors pull the wool over your eyes and tell you that, if your bad cholesterol
is slightly elevated, that you need to go on a statin drug immediately.
Now, I've had to delete several nasty comments on a video I did a while ago from someone
with scathing, scathing attack, in fact, on me, and I had to kick them off the channel,
that said it was reprehensible, and it was disgusting what I was doing, and I was killing
people with my comments, and I was telling people to go to quack doctors and all this
sort of nonsense.
I know a world expert in cardiology who's written many different books on the topic
who gave a presentation called The Big Fat Lie, for example, who said that there is a
correlation between blood fats and heart disease, but it's not the be-all-end-all, all right?
There are other things that influence blood fat, so HDL, LDL, triglycerides, they're all
worth monitoring.
For example, if the LDL or what we call the bad blood fat is elevated, which I recently
found in a friend of mine, I did a further test, a functional test where we examined
all the seven subsets of LDL.
We actually drilled down into the bad cholesterol, and we could see all of the smaller subsets.
In this case, Anthony's VLDL or very low-density lipoprotein was seriously elevated.
Now, Anthony's father died of heart disease at quite a young age, so we're taking this
further now because the question I ask people is, "Have you had a relation very close to
you who is passed away, 50 or younger, with a heart attack or a stroke or an aneurism,
anything like that?"
If they say, "Yes, absolutely," or, "My grandma did," or, "My auntie," or several people,
then we definitely have a more interested deep sort of look into the whole blood fat
kind of profile of that patient.
We look at blood pressures more carefully, and we look more at B12.
We look at factors that influence the body's ability to create pathology in that particular
area.
Genetics play quite a big role when it comes to many specific types of diseases, and heart
and stoke are particular things that I really, really look at when there's a family history
there.
If there's no family history, then a lot of it's lifestyle.
You're too fat, eating the wrong food, stuff like that.
Inflammatory markers, number two, c-reactive protein, high-sensitivity c-reactive protein
or hs and ESR or what we call the sed rate, erythrocyte sedimentation rate.
There are probably others, but these are three key ones that many people look at.
CRP is a protein in the blood that elevates with inflammation.
We know there's a fire, but we don't know where the source of the fire is.
Okay?
If you're flying out of a forest and you see a fire somewhere or smoke, well, you've seen
smoke, big deal, but where is the fire?
Where is the guy with the box of matches?
Where is the fool with the campfire, things like that, that's lighting off fires in a
dry forest?
You're going to identify that guy, and you're going to take him out.
CRP is no different.
Knowing there's inflammation is useless unless you know where the inflammation's coming from.
Was it from a diseased tooth?
Is it from a bunged up ileocecal valve in the gut?
Do you have parasites down there creating inflammation?
Do you have a tonsil problem causing inflammation?
Where is the fire?
That's always my question.Now, the hs or the high-sensitivity relates more to cardiovascular
inflammation in particular, so if hsCRP is elevated, you've got a pretty good indication
you've got a cardiovascular kind of an issues.
If hsCRP is elevated, and the guy's got low B12, and he's got high LDL and a family history,
I'll actually send him off to Auckland up here in the north of the north island, and
I'll get him to get a heart scan done.
It's a very high-speed CT scan of the heart.
They take hundreds of pictures.
They put you through a tunnel.
That maps out, for example, all of the coronary blood vessels, which range, from what I've
been told, from about 9 to about 15 square millimeters of surface area.
The machine will actually do a 3D picture and map out exactly all of those vessels around
the heart to see if there's any coronary calcification going on.
Very, very clever test.
I've had patients take many heart drugs that didn't need to take any drugs at all because
all of the vessels were completely clear around the heart, so I basically told them to get
off that crap.
They had other issues that were causing problems like palpitations, for example, and blood
pressure, but it wasn't the heart.
It's very easy for a doctor to give you a call, judgment call, and put you on a drug
that you may not even need.
Conversely, I've seen people with a very clogged-up heart that were ignored and not put on medications.
When you know tests and you now work with a doctor who can take things further, you're
not going to, hopefully, have any nasty surprises as you get older.
That's the inflammatory.
Especially important, the inflammatory markers, for autoimmune disease, if you've got autoimmunity,
because maybe you'll be able to track down where the elevation of inflammation is.
Inflammation we consider the mother of all disease.
It's one of the key things that pushes a person into cancer, diabetes, or heart disease, or
neurodegenerative disease is inflammatory problem.
Guess where most inflammation starts with people?
In the gut.
Interesting, isn't it?Blood sugars, important for people who think they're pre-diabetic
or people who have, perhaps, adrenal problems or high stress, people with hypoglycemia,
low blood sugar.
people who do a lot of sports or have got a finely-tuned blood sugar regulatory system,
fasting glucose, hemoglobin A1C, very important marker, which just gives you the stability
of blood sugar over about a six-week period.
I call it the HBAC test, the HA1 or BAC test.
The other one is fasting insulin, a very important one if you've got issues there, known issues
with blood sugar, or you're a user of insulin.
You might want to know what your fasting insulin is.
The other one, which no one talks about, is cortisol.
Many people I see have got a lot of stress.
They've got low cortisol or high cortisol, and that can seriously influence their blood
sugar, so it's good to do a salivary cortisol test as well.
Now, notice I'm not giving any reference ranges here because there are many reference ranges
depending on the country you live in, and they can vary slightly from lab to lab kind
of thing.
Thyroid is a key area I look at.
Thyroid stimulating hormone, this is one I know quite a bit about because I work so much
with thyroid patients.
The range can level from naught .5 up to 4.5.
I like a patient to be around 2, 2.5, about midway.
Many people I see are borderline with thyroid, which means there's potentially a problem.
In that case, I go further and test T3, T4, and antibodies as well and, sometimes, reverse
T3.
These are all indicators of a problem.
If a patient has a clear-cut thyroid issue, I'm very interested to know what their iodine
levels are like, so we will do a serum iodine or a 24-hour urine collection and sample that
or an iodine challenge where the patient's given a 50-milligram iodine tablet and the
urine is collected the following day and sampled.
If the person is very deficient in iodine, the thyroid's going to hold a lot of that
50 milligrams back, and only a small amount will get passed out.
If the patient's like me and got good thyroid function, they'll pee out most of the iodine
and, therefore, not be deficient.
The challenge test is the best one for iodine.
Kidney function, creatinine clearance and glomerular filtration rate or GFR.
Your kidneys decline in function, by default, as you get older.
When you get older, like me, your kidney function is just slightly going to go down, down, down.
That's why the big thing is to drink water all the time, less caffeine, less alcohol,
more water.
The kidneys perform an incredible role of filtering thousands of liters of blood.
Every day, they're just filtering, filtering.
Now, coming back to the motorcar, you take it to the mechanic.
They guy or the lady can just get the filter out and bin it, put a new one in, but you're
not really going to go, okay, to the hospital and get a new kidney, get yours binned and
a new one put in.
Doesn't work like that.
You got to look after your kidney.
The kidney really like plenty of clean, fresh water to drink, makes a big difference.
If you notice a problem with the creatinine, the ability for the body not to get rid of
this waste product from muscular respiration, you really need to work on improving kidney
function.
Otherwise, you're going to get a build-up of crap in the body.
Your skin will get itchy and dry.
You'll start getting flaky skin, pain in joints.
All sorts of problems will occur.
Many people with kidney issues get really tired as well.
Kidney function's definitely worth checking out from time to time.Liver function, different
markers here.
You've got AST, ALT, GGT, and alkaline phosphatase.
Some of those markers, for example the AST, has a good indication on drug toxicity, especially
pharmaceutical drug toxicity.
GGT, as in god, god, T, is a good marker for if someone likes having a drink.
If a person likes having a few drinkings here and there and GGT is elevated, you know their
liver is getting whacked with too much alcohol issues there.
If liver is an issue, you may again want to keep an eye on it regularly to make sure that
the markers go down.
It's especially important to test liver function if you're taking pharmaceutical medications
because they're all toxic to the liver, all right, and the kidney.Vitamin B12 is a very
important one.
I've given up counting how many patients I've requested a B12 test and it was very, very
low.
You can also go deeper into B12 and look at MTHFR gene defects, a special test you can
do to see if you got a problem with folate and B12 there.
Vitamin D. Probably one of the most important ones is vitamin D that was never really tested.
I started testing vitamin D about 25, nearly 30 years ago when I first went into practice
when people looked at you strange and said ... even labs would say to me, "What the hell
do you want to test that for?
It's just a vitamin, you know?
Is it that important to get tested?"
Yes, it is important to get tested because I realized the relevance of this with the
immune function.
Many doctors today still don't test for vitamin D. I could spend an hour talking to you about
different case histories of people where I saw rock-bottom vitamin D, and I saw their
life change once they started getting their level up again.
Anxiety disappeared, sleep improved, their chronic disease went away.
I've seen miracles with vitamin D elevation.
You want to keep your levels between 75 to 100 as a minimum.
I routinely see patients between 10 to 15, but you want high levels.
This is one you want to say to your doctor, "I want to get it done."
If the doctor says no, say, "All right.
Bugger you, mate.
I'll go and get it done privately."
The doctor's probably got low vitamin D anyway.
That's probably why he's forgetting to do it or his brain function's not working adequately
or whatever.
Now, homocysteine is a very important marker also.
Okay?
It's a naturally-occurring compound in the body.
Homocysteine needs to be broken down through what we call the methylation cycle.
It needs to break down.
If it doesn't break down, it can build up to quite high levels and then cause a lot
of problems.
Now, the American researcher who did work on this way back in the '70s and '80s, he
believed that the optimal level was around 6 or 7, but I've seen the reference range
now they've bumped it up to between 10 and 15.
I prefer people to have a level under 10, preferably around 7 or 8 I think is good.
Again, B12 will lower homocysteine, B10, B12, B6, and I think it could be magnesium.
There are a few other elements, but you can actually buy homocysteine formulations that
contain all of these elements.
This is a very important one for you to get tested.
In fact, it's that important I'm going to write it down on a piece of paper so you guys
can ... homo, and don't get the wrong idea there, cysteine.
You'll note the word cysteine in there, the amino acid cysteine.
Homocysteine.
By the way, all of these tests we're talking about need to be fasting.
All right?
Don't exercise in the morning.
Have just a very plain, basic meal at night like some steamed vegetables, maybe a piece
of lean protein.
Don't eat any food in the morning til the tests have been done, but you could get a
little bit weak and dizzy if you have too much blood pulled at that point, so you don't
want to get like 15 tubes done at the same time, so be mindful of that.
That's the homocysteine.
The complete blood count is the last one.
All right?
That's red blood cells, white blood cells.
That's the whole shebang, basically, that gives you electrolytes, magnesium, and things
like that, sodium, potassium.
Potassium and sodium are useful markers for adrenal fatigue.
I often look at those as well.
The red blood cells, we can look a whole bunch of parameters there, ferritin, which is the
iron storage protein.
You can look at transfer and saturation.
You can look at TIBC and all these kind of weird things.
This is basically the shape of red blood cells, the size of them, the health of them, so that's
quite important.
Then we look at the cell count as well, how many cells you've got compared to the reference
range.
Yeah, so there you have it.
That's basic by the way.
You can go way more than that, but that gives you a good insight into different blood tests
that you can get performed by your doctor or request these tests yourself and then work
with someone who can interpret them for you, but here's a tip.
When you do all this testing and you find stuff that's really way off the scale, get
an Excel spreadsheet on your computer going and then make sure that you put the date on
there when it was tested and what the marker was, and then track that over a period of
time to see ... You may want to get it tested, for example, every six months or every four
months or three months.
If you do vitamin D and you find it low, okay, put it on the spreadsheet, put the date on
it, and then start taking vitamin D, and then again three months later, test it to make
sure that your vitamin D is gone up.
Common sense?
Not so common, is it?
Try it.
I hope that helps you people out there.
I'll do another video soon on functional medicine testing and my take on different types of
tests.
Thanks so much for tuning in.