Office Hours: The Blood Tests That Actually Matter for Your Health

Most people think lab tests are only useful once something is wrong. But what if your blood work could show you where your health is headed—years before disease ever develops? In today’s Office Hours, I break down how to read your labs through a functional medicine lens—so you can spot early dysfunction, connect the dots between symptoms and biomarkers, and take control of your health before problems escalate. In this episode, I walk you through: • Why “normal” lab ranges often miss early warning signs • The key markers that reveal the most about metabolic health, inflammation, thyroid function, nutrients, and cardiovascular risk • How functional medicine focuses on optimal ranges, patterns, and trends—not just disease thresholds • What your labs can tell you about symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, weight gain, and gut issues • How to track your numbers over time and ask smarter questions to shift from reaction to prevention Labs aren’t just for diagnosing disease—they’re a roadmap to optimizing your future health. When you understand your numbers, you stop guessing and start making data-driven decisions that build resilience and longevity. Visit ⁠functionhealth.com for 160+ lab tests at just $365 a year. Join the 10-Day Detox to Reset Your Brain and Metabolic Health https://drhyman.com/pages/10-day-detox Have a question you’d love answered on Office Hours? Submit it here 👉https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdNF2y4lFWEOMLlzVNlFDpJ4xl7oOpH9NlImMoHr5mHggL_Ww/viewform?usp=header (0:12) Introduction to office hours and lab interpretation importance (6:34) Patient example and proactive health management (11:11) Comprehensive thyroid and advanced cholesterol testing (16:15) Core labs for tracking personal health (18:04) Inflammation's role in chronic disease (22:24) Nutrient levels and gut function in health (24:49) Functional medicine approach to lab results (27:55) Personalized healthcare with Function Health (29:48) Community engagement and episode wrap-up

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Welcome to Office Hours. This is our dedicated 101 space to go deeper, get clearer, and explore what truly moves the needle for your health. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and each week, we're going to pull back the curtain and share the insights, the research, the lessons that don't always make it into our conversations with guests. Because at the end of the day, you are the CEO of your own health. And for many of you, your family's health too. And you might not feel it all the time, but you have far more power and agency than you realize. I'm glad you're here. Imagine spending hundreds, maybe even $1,000 on your blood work, only for your doctor to look you in the eye and say, "Everything's normal. You're fine." But you're not fine. You're exhausted, you have brain fog, you can't lose weight.

• 0:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And that frustrating gap between what the lab says and what your body is screaming is the very reason we created this episode. We're going to show you why those "normal ranges" are actually broken and not accurate, and how to find the real hidden story your blood is telling you. Whether you're using a function or just looking at labs your doctor ordered, this is about helping you make sense of your numbers so you can be proactive about your health. I always say, if you go to the doctor and you get a checkup, and you feel like crap, and your doctor says, "Well, your exam's fine, your labs are fine," there's only two possibilities there. One, either you're crazy, or your doctor's missing something. And I don't think you're crazy, and the truth is, your doctor's missing something. So, let me tell you why understanding labs are important, and why understanding how

• 1:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  to use them, how to interpret them, is even more important. So, lab tests are powerful tools for understanding what's going on underneath the hood in your body. They can help you identify things that are cooking. Along the continuum, disease doesn't just happen from one day to the next that you get sick. You get sick slowly, invisibly, pre-symptomatically, asymptomatic, until one day you start to get symptoms. And then eventually you get a disease and then you need a drug and then it's just a chronic vicious cycle from there. And the key here is to understand labs in the context of your biology and how to optimize your health through tuning your system up. It's like all the systems in your car. Everything's got to be tuned up right for your car to run right. You need the right air in the tires. You need the right trueing

• 2:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  for your steering wheel. You need, I don't know, I'm not a mechanic, but anyway, you get what I'm saying. And the idea is that, you know, we don't really do that to our bodies. We don't have a dashboard for understanding what's happening. Well, this is what we need to do. We need to have a dashboard. The beautiful thing about what's emerging in science is we have a model now of understanding not only what disease is, but what health is. What we want to look at is not just the normal ranges of your lab tests and not just the typical lab test that doctors do in a checkup, which is like 20 something labs that really only abnormal if you're about to die. If your liver fails or kidney fails or your electrolytes are off balance or, you know, your blood count is super low. I mean, these are things that we use in the hospital and they're helpful in acute medicine, but for a checkup,

• 3:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  they're pretty useless and mostly don't show anything. In fact, the annual checkup as currently done has been scientifically shown to be pretty much useless. So, and what we really want to do is understand the root cause, not just a symptomatic approach. And we want to look at what's the body is doing. I co-founded a company called Function Health to really help empower people to be the CEO of their own health, to understand what's going on under the hood, to have agency over the health, to be the CEO of your own health and look deeper into the root causes, into subtle disturbances that can lead to symptoms later or diseases, or even to find out things that are currently going on that you may not know about. And I mean, you could have diabetes and not know it. You could have

• 3:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  an autoimmune disease and have subtle symptoms that you don't know about that are not tracking. And the beautiful thing about function is it helps you look at things over time, not just a snapshot in time, but a continuous longitudinal, deep data set on what's going on with your body. Your health is always changing and that's true throughout your life. You're going through different phases, ages, experiences. And the only way to really understand what's happening inside your body is through doing comprehensive diagnostic testing on a regular basis, not just once a year, not when something goes wrong, consistently longitudinally, so you can track things, catch problems early and stay ahead of the problem. And this way, you know, you can honestly prevent most of the diseases. We're able to look at very rarely signs of metabolic dysfunction, for example, like

• 4:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  where they're heading for diabetes or Alzheimer's risk, or obviously cardiovascular risk, hormonal dysfunction, nutritional diseases and deficiencies are really common that often will lead to problems later on. So most of us are walking around with these blind spots. We don't really know we have these problems where we think we're fine. We don't really know what's going on and we think how we feel is kind of normal. We just had a subtle symptoms or it's kind of just how we are. And I call it the FLC syndrome when we feel like crap and, and we think it's normal. Oh, we should have no headaches or we should have joint pain or we should have sinus issues or we should have migraines or we should be tired or I should have a bowel or I'm a little depressed or whatever. These are things we've come to accept as just part of who we are. They're really not. They're just signs of imbalances. And so we don't really want to guess, we want to test.

• 5:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And that's what I would say, test, don't guess. And, and we want to use real data, including your medical history and your lab data and lots of other information we're collecting with Function Health, including your wearables and your genetics eventually, stool testing. And this is really where we have access to stuff that you never had access before unless you went to the doctor and had him or her know what to order, which they usually don't because they're only looking for acute disease and understand how to interpret them, which they don't. And the insurance pay for them, which they won't. So you're kind of stuck in a system that doesn't allow you to be proactive about your health. But that's why we co-founded Function was to help really create that platform where you can do this. And when you look under the hood, you do full body lab testing, just comprehensive testing of every system in your body, not necessarily looking for disease, but also

• 6:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  looking for imbalances that lead to disease. Doing advanced full body MRI imaging, which we now offer through Ezra as part of Function, you go to function.com and learn all about this. You get real insights and clarity about what's going on with your health. You can take back control. You start being preventive and proactive instead of just being in a reactive system. We have a reactive medical system, not a proactive system, and that needs to change. We wait until you have a disease and then we, you know, give you a treatment. I had a patient once who had a blood sugar of like 115, which is heading towards diabetes. And I said, hey, did your doctor ever check you on this? And he said, oh yeah, we checked. What did the doctor say? Well, he said, we will follow it. And when it gets to the diabetes range, we'll give him medication. That is the worst approach. You want to be the opposite of that.

• 6:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And really Function Health was created out of this need for, at least what I believe in our, on the co-founder's belief, was for people to be able to actually have access to their own health data and to own it. And we, with Function, can test literally hundreds and hundreds of biomarkers for a dollar a day, which is just really affordable for most people. This is less than a cup of coffee a day. You can get a comprehensive assessment of over 110 biomarkers twice a year and even add on other tests that are advanced tests for looking for Alzheimer's, autoimmune disease, or allergies, or other things you might want to look at mold. And it'll tell you what's going on. It'll help you reveal these patterns. It'll give you the clues of what's going on in your body. And it'll help guide you with what we call medical intelligence, which is a system that

• 7:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  allows you to filter all of your personal health data, including your history, your lab data, your wearables, everything into a system that also is almost omniscient. In other words, it knows all the scientific literature. It's been trained by hundreds of knowledge experts. It looks at the data through machine learning AI and helps you to understand where you are, where you're going, and what to do about it in a way we never had possible before. In a way, that's way smarter than most doctors and honestly way smarter than me. You know, I've been doing functional medicine and doing this for 40 years. It's really so good in terms of understanding what's happening and the patterns. So let's talk about the problem with lab tests in general. The first problem is you get your lab back and your doctor goes, well, they're normal. They're normal.

• 8:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What the hell does normal mean? Normal is essentially, it's a scientific term that means two standard deviations from the mean. So when you look at the, you know, the average of the population, you do two standard deviations separate from that. That's what's normal. So it could be, if you're two or 92, you know, that's a big range of people. Uh, and we want to look at what's, what's optimal, not what's normal. And, and, and just to help you understand this, if you were to land in America and you were to say, you know, what is the normal weight of Americans? It's overweight because 75% of us are overweight. It's abnormal to be thin in America today, but it doesn't mean it's good. It just means it's called normal. So we want to get away from saying, oh, your labs are normal.

• 9:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You're fine. We want to look at what is optimal, what is an optimal lab range? In other words, your vitamin D on their lab says it's 29, that's low. If it's 31, that's good, but actually it should be more like 50 as optimal. So even though lab rates range changes are showing you a number that seems like it's normal. Let's say your lab range is 31, that's not good. You're going to get more bone loss, more immune funk dysfunction, yours for autoimmune disease, risk for heart disease, dementia, cancers, all go up if your vitamin D levels are not over 50. I mean, if you, if you had a COVID infection in your lab, a vitamin D was over 50, there were zero deaths in that population, zero. So we need to look at what's optimal, not what's is normal.

• 9:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So the conventional lab ranges just missed this early dysfunction, like, like in other words, um, we keep, we keep shifting the goalposts. You talk about hypertension, then we talk about pre hypertension and we talk about diabetes and we talk about prediabetes. We talk about autoimmune disease and we talk about pre autoimmune disease. Well, it's not pre anything. This is just early disturbances that are leading you on that path. So if your blood sugar is normal, it's uh, 70 to 100, but what if you're 99?

• 10:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's not really optimal. It should be probably between 70 and 80, 87, according to literature. Cause after that, your risk goes up. When doctors order tests, they're just ordering things that are really, like I said, only abnormal if you're in the hospital. They got your CBC, which is your blood count. So if you're anemic, well, great. I mean, I, I had surgery. I was anemic. I needed to check my blood count. It was low. I got a blood transfusion, you know, that's, that's good. It's helpful. Uh, you can see if you have an infection, high white count, but you have to be kind of sick, really sick. It doesn't really look for chronic illness. Your basic metabolic panel is your blood sugar, electrolytes, liver, kidneys. I mean, those are really things that are only abnormal, your calcium. These are abnormal when you're really sick. Cholesterol they check for sure, but again, the way they check it is really outdated and almost meaningless.

• 10:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's the one kind of thing they're looking at in the screening, but it's basically a reaction. If you have high cholesterol, take a statin, which is not always the right answer. So a lot of things also that are symptoms that get missed, you know, have clues in your lab tests, right? So fatigue, it could be so many things that are causing that. It could be thyroid, it could be autoimmune disease, it could be low B vitamins, it could be low vitamin D, a brain fog, same thing. And wake gain, you know, you're struggling with waking. Why? Maybe you have normal blood sugar, but your insulin levels might be sky high or might have depression or mood changes, but you might have very low folate or B12, which may be showing up through our advanced testing of homocysteine and methylmalonic acid, which are the better tests to check for B12 and folate.

• 11:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Or maybe you have low omega three fats, which we check, and that can lead to obviously depression if you have low omega three. So joint pain, the same thing. Maybe you have gluten sensitivity, maybe you have a high CRP that's showing you have an autoimmune disease or an autoimmune marker. Skin issues, also same thing. There's so many things that we can test. You might have dairy allergy, you might have gluten issues, you might have insulin resistance if you have acne, which we can tell. So all these things that seem quote normal actually have things that we can find on your lab tests and then help you fix. Now thyroid is a great example. Most doctors don't check thyroid as a routine screening test. If they do, they only check one out of five important tests that you need to look at your thyroid. Five, they only do one, and it's called TSH.

• 12:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And that can be quote normal, but the range there is point five to five. Now, that's not actually good because according to the American College of Endocrinology, it should be anything over three and a half should be considered a slow thyroid. But again, most doctors don't treat that, don't look at it. And then they don't look at the whole picture. They don't tell the whole story. You want to look at the, the actual thyroid hormones because TSH is just checking your brain and seeing if it's making the stimulant for your thyroid, the thyroid stimulating hormone. But the T3, if you have low T3, that's the active hormone that actually does the work in the body. Maybe low because there's a conversion problem from T3 to 4. That can be for a lot of reasons like selenium deficiency or mercury poisoning

• 13:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  or yeast overgrowth or toxins. All, a lot of things can affect it. And you also have a high reverse T3, which again is another test we do, which is kind of like a break on your thyroid. It can happen from chronic disease. So you might have a normal looking thyroid, but your reverse T3 is high and you're basically thyroid is not working. You also have thyroid antibodies. A lot of people have thyroid antibodies, which we check. And 13% of function members have elevated thyroid antibodies. And I bet you a lot of those people are not treated. They're incidental findings that they didn't know they had that are causing subtle symptoms. It could be, oh, my hair is a little dry or my nails are cracking or my skin is dry or a little fluid retention or a little depressed or my cholesterol is a little high

• 13:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  or I'm low constipated or my sex rise is a little low or very, very like subtle symptoms of thyroid dysfunction or I'm not sleeping. And you might have an autoimmune thyroid condition that's not even actually showing up on the other test. And so your TSH could look normal, but you're basically low thyroid function. So you might feel these symptoms, right? Brain fog, fatigue, waking, constipation, depression. But you're told that, you know, it's normal and maybe it's in your head. But the truth is there's something going on. If you look deeply, and this is why we, we, we've done this. And I, we've, we basically developed a lab panel based on the most common things that people are suffering from, that doctors are missing, that it can have a profound impact on improving their health in the long term. And so when we look at what's going on, we look at all the patterns in the data. It's not just one analyte.

• 14:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We look at everything together.

• 14:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you don't want to just look at that, but you want to look at, we actually can do an advanced test for insulin resistance, where we look at markers that are just now available. But also your liver function test may be abnormal. Your kidney function might be abnormal. You might have protein urine, you might have low testosterone. If you're a man, you might have high testosterone. If you're a woman, you might have a, uh, uh, other issues like hyaluronic acid. You might have inflammation on high CRP. You can see these patterns that, that kind of tell you a story. It's not just one lab test, but how are these all connected? And The key is you want to understand how your body is this one big system and everything affects everything. So when you really look at what function's doing, it's really providing you with a deep, comprehensive picture of your biology in the moment and then longitudinally over

• 15:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  time. And it helps you understand where those patterns are, where you, where your personal health is and how to understand what's going on, and then how to optimize things and get them into an optimal range, not just normal range. And in doing that, people will have a profound improvement in their overall health. It's really quite remarkable what happens when you start to tune people up, even the simplest things. I mean, if you're just low in vitamin D, you know, you could be getting more frequent infections and colds. You could be having seasonal affect disorder or the winter blues. You could have muscle aches and pains. You could have all sorts of things that are subtle. But when you correct it, you feel better. And the FLC syndrome or feel like crap really improves. All right. So let's get into it. What are the

• 16:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  core labs that everybody should know about and should track in their bodies, right? And what do they tell you? I mean, you can only, you know, run a few tests to truly understand what's going on in your body. What would be giving you the most valuable information and why? So let's break it down into the big categories of what we track and what we need to track. The first is metabolic health. And when I say metabolic health, I mean, blood, sugar regulation and insulin. This is what's driving most of the disease in America today. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, aging itself, weight gain, obesity. I mean, the list goes on. So the things that we track are fasting glucose, which most doctors will check on your checkup. We also check A1C, even if you're not diabetic, because it changes

• 16:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  slowly. And as I said, anything from over five, starting to increase can be a concern. And we check your fasting insulin, which is really important, because that's the first thing to go up before your blood sugar, A1C go up, your insulin goes up fasting. And it's really important to look at that. So you want to look at what the optimum range is for blood sugar, not their reference range. And the optimum range is probably 70 to 85, not like up to 100. Now, if you go to 100 to 126, that's diabetes, 126 is diabetes, but it's a continuum of dysfunction. And when you fix your metabolic health, it improves everything, your energy, your mood, longevity. It's the key to longevity is understanding what's going on with your metabolic health. And if you have insulin resistance, you might have belly fat and weight gain,

• 17:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  sugar cravings, you might feel crashes up and down with your energy after meals, like hypoglycemic, you might have brain fog, tired, and you might have many, many other symptoms too, like diseases. But those are symptoms that are common and, and often people will just dismiss those. But when you look at the full function health panel, it includes all this metabolic testing we're talking about, but also includes, and we'll talk about in a minute, special cholesterol testing that most doctors don't do, that is been around for about 40 years, but still hasn't been adopted because it takes decades for things for like, like that are innovations to get into medicine. The next big category we want to look at is inflammation because inflammation again is one of the biggest drivers of chronic illness and it, and the major cause is metabolic

• 18:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  dysfunction, which is related to blood sugar, but there are other causes. And we look at your inflammation level, something called HSCR P, which is a cytokine or molecule the liver makes that is related to inflammation. We look at ferritin, which can be an iron storage marker, but if it's high, it also is an inflammation marker. We also get your blood count and, and in your white count and your white cells and all those tell a lot of, of a story about what's going on with your immune system and inflammation. So we can tell if there's low grade inflammation and this underlies most chronic conditions. So when you identify inflammation early, you can find out the cause. What is the cause? It can be toxins, poor diet, stress, allergens, you know, microbes, changing your microbiome, but it these, this creates this quiet, silent,

• 18:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  deadly killer of inflammation. And that leads to pretty much, as I said, almost all the diseases of aging. In fact, one of the hallmarks of aging is inflamaging, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, dementia, stroke, kidney disease. These are all inflammatory diseases, even hypertension, inflammatory diseases. And if we figure out the cause of inflammation, we can get it sorted. It'll also help us track autoimmune diseases as well. Really important and a lot of people can have vague symptoms of inflammation. They just might not feel good. They might be achy. They might be tired. They might have brain fog. They could obviously have weight gain because of that. Inflammation from any cause will cause weight gains. For example, if you have a gut issue and you have bad bugs in your gut and they're producing inflammatory molecules,

• 19:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  you can gain weight independent of having a crappy diet because it'll just drive inflammation. All right, let's talk about cholesterol. Cholesterol is one of those things that, you know, doctors check. Everybody gets it. It's standard, but they don't do the right test.

• 19:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And they miss doing a whole bunch of tests that are really, really important. So yes, we look at total cholesterol and HDL and LDL and triglycerides, but we look at the quality of those particles and cholesterol molecules. We look at the size of them and we look at the number of them. And it tells a very different picture of what's going on. So you're going to have perfectly normal cholesterol, but it can be made up of all the worst particles and your risk of heart disease is really bad. Or you could have a really high cholesterol and it's made up of all the good particles and not a lot of them and you're totally fine. So you, you can't really tell what's going on with your heart cholesterol or disease risk without doing the right cholesterol test.

• 20:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And function health does that. Now, we also test other things that doctors miss. We look at APO B, probably one of the most important predictors of heart disease risk, which is a sort of measure of all the small and bad particles in your blood. We also look at something called lipoprotein little A or LPA little A. And that, that's a genetically determined cholesterol marker, but it can be managed and treated and it's important to know because you have to manage your other risks more aggressively. And a lot of people have it and doctors miss it and then even look for it. Now, the thing about heart disease is, I don't want to scare people, but the first symptom of a heart attack and heart disease, for 50% of the people that have it, you know what it is? Sudden death, you literally dropped dead of a heart attack and you have no idea it's coming, literally no idea.

• 21:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's terrible. So you don't want to wait. And then it's often subtle, even if you have symptoms. So people don't know and they can be a little tired, a little short breath, a little whatever. And, and they don't know how bad their heart disease. I had a friend who was like 53 years old and he had pretty significant heart disease and 90% occlusion and he was jogging and felt a little tired, short breath. And, you know, he didn't get any issues. When he got checked, he had a full occlusion. He has really bad lipid particles. So really important to get this diagnostics early and manage it. You can manage through lifestyle, you can manage through supplements, sometimes medications are needed, but really important to manage your risk. We'll also look at thyroid. We talked a little bit about that earlier. I won't go too much into it, but you know, it's important to the full panel of thyroid

• 22:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  tests, including TSH, free T3, free T4, thyroid antibodies, sometimes reverse T3. And you have to look at what's optimal, not just what the normal range is, but what's optimal. Like if the range is 0.5 to 5 for TSH, probably the optimal should be like one to two. And so we look at that and try to get people in the optimal range and not just manage to the lab reference range. And you get really subtle symptoms, as I mentioned, fatigue, hair loss, constipation, brain fog, weight gain, depression, you know, low sex drive, cracked nails, hair loss. I mean, loss of the outer third of your eyebrows and all kinds of stuff that just don't really maybe seem serious, but that are serious. Cause if you, if you have it untreated, you actually will end up having a higher risk of having heart attacks and other conditions later in life.

• 22:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What about nutrients? Doctors don't check your nutritional status. Now, what is the point of nutrients anyway? I mean, there's 37 billion trillion chemical reactions in your body every second. Every single one of those chemical reactions, cause you've got about 40 trillion cells, every single one of those chemical reactions needs a helper, an enzyme.

• 23:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  To convert one molecule to the next and every enzyme needs a helper and those helpers are vitamins and minerals. So they literally grease the wheels of your metabolic system in such a profound way that that one third of our entire DNA codes for enzymes and those enzymes need these nutrients and they all need different amounts. So getting the right nutrient status for you is really important. And that's why we do a deep dive on nutrients. We look at vitamin D, we look at zinc, magnesium, iron studies, omega threes, folate, B12 minerals, a lot, lots more. We can check all kinds of things, but you really want to get a good, basic picture. We do that on the, on the basic function panel, but it's also add-ons. So you can do much, much more. And you want to track it over time because it changes and your needs change, but getting your nutrient levels optimized is so important.

• 23:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We also look at things that can relate to abnormal gut function, you know, things like iron absorption may be low, B12 may be low because of absorption issues. You might have inflammation related to gut stuff. You have liver functions that might be elevated. Your blood sugar even can be as tight as I mentioned to your microbiome. So all these things are really related and are important to track. So, and you can have all kinds of symptoms that doctors dismiss. Oh, it's IBS, it's in your head. What's the big deal? You know, just relax and it's all anxiety. Not true. Irritable bowel is caused by, and not in irritable brain, but the irritable bowel causes an irritable brain. It's the other direction. It's the body mind effect, not the mind body effect. And you can have a

• 24:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  bloating, constipation, diarrhea, reflux, food sensitivities, all these things we can start to manage and check for. So let's talk about how, how we read labs differently from the perspective of understanding the body as a system or a network, the root cause medicine. Some people call it functional medicine. I don't really care what you call it, but this is really where science is going. So when I look at a lab, I can look at the same results that's another doctor and see a totally different story. And I see a very different picture because. I'm looking for subtle patterns. I'm looking for relationships between things. I'm looking for root causes. So instead of like looking for, oh, do we have a diagnosable disease that shows up in a lab test? Do you have like megaloblastic anemia that comes from severe B12 deficiency?

• 25:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Maybe not, but maybe you have a subtle change in the size of your red blood cells that's creeping up. It indicates that you might have a B12 deficiency. That's an early on one. That's not so severe. And so you can look at these things like insulin. You might see insulin should be, you know, the reference range is 18 on the lab, but it should be less than five. So if it starts to go from five to 10, you're like, oh, you're getting in trouble over 10, more serious over 20, you're in big trouble. So really how to look at subtle things, a thyroid subtle shifts in thyroid, subtle shifts in inflammation, subtle shifts in your insulin related lipids, which is particle size, particle number. All these things really help you identify what's going on and they they're beautiful because we can actually not just measure one point in time.

• 25:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We can actually track things over time in a systematic way. And that tells you some really important data. So like, for example, like you might see your blood sugar is 95 and the doctor goes, oh, that's fine. But your insulin's a little high. Your triglycerides are going up, which is a sign of prediabetes. Inflammation is going up a little bit. And these are clues that things are really going off the rails long before you actually become diabetic. So really important to start tracking these things, subtle changes over time. And tracking it against you because everybody's different. So your own, your own reference range is, what's your optimal, what's your baseline? It may be different than somebody else. So how do you then approach your own labs? What should you do? Well, think about labs as a window into how your body's actually functioning.

• 26:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And how you begin to interpret them through a functional lens, how your body's working. How do you think about this? First of all, always get a copy of your labs. Function provides you with a copy. You can, you can download the full version. You can see it on the dashboard. But you really want to, if you're going to see your doctor, you want to look at your labs. You also want to compare your results to optimal range, not just normal. So in all the content for function. Each biomarker, we reach, we show you what is the normal range, the reference range, and then what's the optimum range. And then it's important to track things at least once or twice a year, based on what the issues are, the patterns are. Is your insulin going up? Is your inflammation rising or CRP going up? Is your vitamin D a little low? Is it worse in the winter? So then you can kind of be more proactive with your doctor.

• 27:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And this is the key, you know, am I hanging in the right direction? What's borderline, but still important? What lifestyle changes can move this? They may or may not know, but with Function Health, we have now medical intelligence and we have a medical function chat, which you can kind of interact with your own data. And based on your own data and your self-awareness, you can be proactive, you can be preventive, we can do a personalized approach to optimizing your health and not be in this reactive state that medicine is in. So just remember, labs aren't just for diagnosing disease. They're basically helping you identify a roadmap to optimizing your health and your future health. It really is what Function's all about. It's about empowering people with their own data. It's about helping people have agency, about being the CEO of your own health, about being able

• 28:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  to measure, track, and empower yourself with long-term data and insights from the world's top doctors and scientists in the world scientific literature, but using your own data as the core anchor that all that information is helping you understand. And so Function does all these things in one panel, which is, which is really super easy to understand, and it's really elegant. And I encourage you to check it out. You go to functionhealth.com/marc and check it out. Now, if this episode sparked something for you, I want to invite you to take the next step. Don't just hear this information. I want you to apply it. Get curious about your own data. Look at your labs through a new lens. Dig deeper and start connecting the dots in your own health story. And if you know someone who's struggling,

• 28:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  and someone doesn't feel well, but keeps being told their labs are quote, "normal", I want you to share this episode with them. It might be the perspective shift they've been waiting for. We all deserve access to real answers, and this is where it begins. Thanks for joining me for office hours. I love diving into these topics with you. Remember, you are the CEO of your own health and every choice you make can move you closer to healing and vitality. I want to keep these episodes as relevant and useful as possible. So tell me, what do you want to explore next? What questions are you wrestling with? What breakthroughs are you chasing? Share your ideas in the comments on social media or through the link in the show notes. I'm listening. Until next time, keep taking

• 29:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  charge, keep asking questions, and keep showing up for your health.

• 29:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  When it comes to supplements, you only want the best for your body, the kind with the highest quality, cleanest, and most potent ingredients you can get. That's exactly what you'll find at my supplement store, where I've hand-selected each and every product to meet the most rigorous standards for safety, purity, and effectiveness. These are the only supplements I recommend to my patients, and they're also what I use myself. Whether you want to optimize longevity, or reduce your disease risk, or you're looking to improve your sleep, blood sugar, metabolism, gut health, you name it, drhyman.com has the world's best selection of top-quality, premium supplements, all backed by science and expertly vetted by me, Dr. Mark Hyman. So check out drhyman.com because when it comes to your health, nothing less than the very best will do. That's drhyman.com, D-R-H-Y-M-A-N.com.

• 30:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical

• 31:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that Does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at UltraWellnessCenter.com and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.