5 blood tests your GP won't order
Forty-two lines on your results. All green. And the energy still isn't there — your hair's thinning, the weight creeps up despite the diet.
Normal is not the same as healthy. There's nothing wrong with you — the lab range is simply too wide. You can google the names of these five tests in five minutes. What you can't google: the optimal range for each (not the lab “normal”, but the level where you actually feel the difference) and what to do about it. That's what's inside.
Sound familiar?
- ✓ Results all “normal”, yet the fatigue won't lift
- ✓ TSH “fine”, yet your hair keeps ending up on the brush
- ✓ Sugar's good, yet the weight won't budge despite the diet
- ✓ Your cycle's off, yet the tests look fine
- ✓ Your GP says you're OK, yet you feel you're not
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A practical guide to take with you to a private lab. For each of the five results: the optimal range (not just the lab “normal”) and what to do about it. 8 pages, about 6 minutes, straight to your inbox.
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Why everything's “normal”, yet you feel it isn't?
A lab range is the range most of the tested population falls into. The trouble is, that population today is, to put it gently, in mixed shape. “Normal” doesn't mean “healthy”. It just means you're like most people.
I'm based in Manchester and I know this system from the inside. I know what the seven-minute appointment looks like, where the easiest thing to hear is “your results are normal, take something for the pain and keep an eye on it” — not because anyone's a bad doctor, but because that's simply the default here. The standard panel was built to catch disease that's already there, not to answer why you feel worse and worse.
I look at it differently: not whether you fall within the range, but whether you're at your optimum. The body sends a signal long before the marker your GP looks at so much as moves. You just need to know where to look.
What's inside
For each test: where the lab “normal” ends, where the range you can actually feel begins, and where to start.
Fasting insulin
Glucose breaks down last. Insulin climbs up to a decade earlier. Your GP looks at sugar and says it's lovely, while your pancreas has been working in third gear for ages.
Ferritin
A result near the bottom of the range isn't a “mild deficiency”. It's fatigue, hair on the brush and a thyroid struggling, even though TSH is “normal”.
Thyroid antibodies (anti-TPO, anti-TG)
Hashimoto's can attack the thyroid for years before TSH so much as moves. These two results show it before the symptoms arrive.
Vitamin D — read against optimum
Not against the threshold where rickets begins, but against the range where you actually feel the difference. Two different numbers, two different ways of feeling.
Quiet inflammation (hsCRP)
The marker nobody measures until you've got a fever. Yet it says more about what's smouldering inside than CRP alone.
Who's behind this
Konrad Kowalik, functional naturopathy consultant
Based in Manchester. I help people make sense of results that come back “normal” while something is still off — clients across five countries, consultations in English and Polish. This guide is a shortcut to where I most often begin.
This material is educational and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis or a recommendation of treatment. Konrad Kowalik is a functional naturopathy consultant, not a doctor. Make health decisions consciously and, where needed, discuss them with your doctor.