Episode 326: Has Functional Medicine Created More Problems Than Solutions?
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Inflammatory title? Totally. In this think piece, Erin discusses the drawbacks, red flags and potential issues with certain functional medicine philosophies. She's getting honest with caveats to consider with functional lab testing — including how both the placebo and nocebo effects can play a role in a patient's healing process. This episode is not only geared for practitioners who are practicing functional medicine and analyzing lab tests, but also for the client on the receiving end.
The Funk’tional Nutrition Academy™, our 14-month functional nutrition certification program, is open for enrollment. We’d love to see your application come through!
In this episode:
Is lab testing the only way to validate health? [9:30]
Interoception: what it is and why it's relevant [10:53]
Functional medicine fear mongering [20:54]
The Nocebo Effect: How you communicate lab results can impact your client’s ability to heal [28:27]
Understanding that lab tests are not perfect [25:59]
Using symptoms as a data point [37:54]
Resources mentioned:
Funk’tional Nutrition Academy™ (Enrollment open NOW!)
Free Masterclass on Functional Lab Testing
1:1 Membership (Limited spots available to get started in October!)
Qualia Senolytic (get up to 50% off and an extra 15% off your first purchase with link + code FUNKS)
Organifi supplement powder (save 20% on your order with code FUNK)
Ned Natural Remedies (get 20% off your order with code FUNK)
LMNT Electrolyte Replenishing powder (Use code FUNK get a free sample pack with any purchase!)
Learn more about Functional Nutrition
Related episodes:
263: How to Listen to Your Intuition
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Erin Holt [00:00:02]:
I'm Erin Holt, and this is the Funk'tional Nutrition Podcast, where we lean into intuitive functional medicine. We look at how diet, our environment, our emotions, and our beliefs all affect our physical health. This podcast is your full bodied, well rounded resource. I've got over a decade of clinical experience, and because of that, I've got a major bone to pick with diet culture and the conventional healthcare model. They're both failing so many of us. But functional medicine isn't the panacea that it's made out to be, either. We've got some work to do, and that's why creating a new model is my life's work. I believe in the ripple effect.
Erin Holt [00:00:39]:
So I founded the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy, a school and mentorship for practitioners who want to do the same. This show is for you if you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health and you're ready to be an active participant in your own healing. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. I would love for you to follow the show, rate, review, and share because you never know whose life you might change. And of course, keep coming back for more. Hello out there, my friends. Happy September. So I recognize that the title of this podcast is a little inflammatory.
Erin Holt [00:01:20]:
So I will preface it all by saying, first and foremost, I love functional medicine. I practice functional medicine. We work with people one on one. Here at the Funk'tional Nutritionist, I have a 14 month academy where we've trained over 100 clinicians, RDs, NP's, acupuncturists, PTs, chiropractors, nutrition professionals in the art and skill of functional medicine. So I love functional medicine, and I also recognize its limitations. And I'm pretty skillful at holding multiple truths at once. So I can say that.
Erin Holt [00:01:59]:
I can say I love functional medicine. I love this industry and functional medicine. And this industry has some problems. It has some limitations. When I see limitations, how my brain works is I want to search for solutions and then I teach those solutions once I've explored them. It's kind of the premise of this whole entire show, and it's also what I do in the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy, FNA, our academy, where we train and certify practitioners in functional nutrition and intuitive functional medicine. By the way, it's September. That means enrollment for our fall cohort is officially open.
Erin Holt [00:02:38]:
We only open enrollment twice a year, so be sure to get your application and go to funktionalnutritionacademy.com. We'll link it up in the show notes. So today I was planning to talk about the benefit of labs specifically for practitioners, how to increase your value with functional labs, how to be more valuable to your clients and patients with this service. Because I know and I believe that functional labs can be so valuable, they can offer so much value. I'm going to stick a pin in that conversation until next week because a couple of comments I received on a recent Instagram video had me thinking before getting into that discussion, I want to get into this one today where we have to ask ourselves, where is functional medicine potentially creating more problems than solutions. For those of you who are new here, because anytime I talk about anything negative, any downsides to functional labs, people want to like, climb out of the woodwork to tell me all the benefits to functional labs. So I know I totally, totally get that. I've been working with people in the nutrition health coaching wellness space for almost 15 years now.
Erin Holt [00:03:55]:
I've been running functional labs for close to seven years. So I truly understand the utility of them and recognize that all of my opinions on all of this stuff is based off of clinical experience over those past seven years of using labs, over those past 15 years of working one on one with people. It's also based off of what we're hearing from our audience, both here on the podcast and on Instagram, and then what we're seeing in mentorship with our FNA students. So I feel like I come by my opinion honestly, but it's just that it's my opinion today is more like a thought piece, food for thought. Consideration. If you're in the functional medicine space, or if you want to be in the functional medicine, or even if you're working with a functional medicine practitioner, I believe these are things that you should be aware of. As an aside, I just heard that there is a mentor in the Nutrition Therapy Association, which is a health coaching school, who's recommending my podcast as a top resource to her students. And that just tickles me pink. So thank you for that.
Erin Holt [00:05:01]:
If you are a practitioner listening to the show. Hi. Hello. Welcome. And today's episode resonates with you. You will love my Free Masterclass on Functional Lab Testing, which is I explore a unique approach to accelerating your clients transformation through functional labs. So we'll link that up in the show notes as well. That resource.
Erin Holt [00:05:22]:
Um, all right, let's get into it. So I referenced an Instagram post. Here's what the post said. I said, before spending money, or it was a reel, it was a video before spending a money on functional labs here's what I do first. That's the hook. Okay. And notice I say, I said functional labs, not routine lab work, a comp panel. I said functional labs.
Erin Holt [00:05:43]:
Before spending money on functional labs, here's what I would do first. And then I would went on to say, be in bed for 8 hours every night. Eat primarily whole foods. Reduce, remove, package, and processed foods. Eat in a way to balance blood sugar. Have a consistent movement practice, and no binge drinking. So if you're like, binge drinking, what's up with that? Binge drinking for women is defined as four drinks in a single occasion. And you're just not putting your body in a position to heal.
Erin Holt [00:06:13]:
If you're drinking a bottle of wine several nights a week, you'd be surprised. We do have clients that come to us. They've got all these health problems, and they're like, I need a stool test. And it's like, maybe you actually need to drink less. And we have to look at the driver of that consumption, because the driver of that consumption might be your root cause or one of your root causes. You know, I love to say sometimes your root cause is deeper than a stool test. This is the stuff that I'm talking about. So it's definitely something we'd want to unpack and explore.
Erin Holt [00:06:42]:
I also recognize, before people crawl out of the woodwork to say this to me, I get it. I get that no amount of alcohol consumption is considered healthy. But I'm always here to share honesty, not preach idealism. And the truth is that we have seen our clients heal with occasional alcohol consumption. I'm sorry for the idealists out there, but rigidity rarely gets people super far in clinical practice. So that was my post. I went on to explain that changing these things, these foundations, these basics, can radically improve how you feel. And if you're working with any type of functional practitioner, they should be assessing for and encouraging these foundations before recommending expensive lab testing.
Erin Holt [00:07:30]:
This is nothing new. This is nothing that's never been said before. It's my opinion that the foundations are always the place to start before getting lost down a root cause rabbit hole with a practitioner, we're going to get into root cause rabbit holes a little later today. If you're not doing the foundations, this is a root cause. Okay.
Erin Holt [00:07:52]:
This might be part of why you feel unwell. With all of that said, most of our clients that come to us here at the Funk'tional Nutritionist come to us already doing these things. They're already doing the basics. And despite nailing the foundations, they're still experiencing a ton of symptoms. And that's when we say, all right, let's tuck and roll into some functional lab testing. So a comment from this post came from another functional medicine practitioner, and the goal here is not to criticize the individual. It's not to critique the person. But it's more so to take a look at the philosophy that's being represented here because I think it represents one of the major league problems that I'm at least seeing in the functional medicine space.
Erin Holt [00:08:43]:
So this practitioner said, I agree with you in we should be doing these things already. But how you feel is not always an indicator of how healthy you are. Why? Because we have thresholds of awareness and we can have things happening within our bodies that are below that threshold. Labs can be valuable to see where we're at and reveal things we're not consciously aware of. They can also measure progress that our perception is not picking up. So there's some things there that I totally agree with. I'm still an advocate for doing the basics before spending a ton of money on functional labs. And of course, there's some caveats to this, and we're gonna get into a lot of that stuff next week, the lab specific stuff.
Erin Holt [00:09:30]:
But here's what I really want to tuck into today for today's discussion. Somebody else commented and responded back to this practitioner, and they said, if you're doing the things that she recommends in the caption and you feel healthy, why go looking for problems? Oof, that's good. You can tell this person, and in fact, I dialogued with this person. This person has been through the wringer of functional medicine. You can tell. And so the practitioner came back and said, again, doubling down on this, how you feel is not an indication of how healthy you are because our threshold of awareness is limited. Think of the iceberg. Above the water is the conscious awareness, but everything below that you're not aware of.
Erin Holt [00:10:22]:
In addition, we are not looking for problems. We are looking to increase awareness. If you are healthy, then the lab results are nothing to fear. They will just confirm that. All right. Can you hear me rubbing my hands together? You ready to get into it? I actually love the idea of increasing awareness. Love that. What I don't love is the idea that the only way we can increase awareness is through external data points.
Erin Holt [00:10:53]:
So that's what I really want to unpack today. And I believe what this practitioner is referencing as threshold of awareness is actually referring to interoception, and interoception is a real thing. It's the ability to be aware of internal sensations in the body, such as hunger, heart rate, temperature and pain. I love how Susan Sands refers to this as body sense. It's the body that we feel and experience from within. And different people absolutely have different levels of interoception. Traumatic childhood experiences can impact your perception of internal bodily signals.
Erin Holt [00:11:34]:
So if you have trauma in childhood, it can essentially lead you to disregard your own body, which can lead to lack of trust in body signals. So we can see deficient interoception or lower levels of body awareness in those with unprocessed trauma. Trauma aside, many women, through societal, family, cultural programming, learn to view their body as something to be rejected or ignored. We've learned to dismiss, hate or fear our bodies. That can lead to body disconnect. We're rarely taught, if ever, to listen, understand, interpret sensations coming from within our own bodies and use this information to make decisions about what we need and what we want. This is so much what I've talked about on the show for the past seven years. Just a couple of episodes that come to mind.
Erin Holt [00:12:22]:
Episode 263, How to Listen to Your Intuition. Episode 270, Understanding Anxiety and the Brain Body Connection. Those are just two out of hundreds of episodes where I've discussed this. So I don't disagree with the idea that some of us have a real disconnect from what we're feeling in our body. The part that gets me about this comment, and this is one of the places where I think aspects of what we're calling functional medicine has actually just been carbon copied over from conventional western allopathic medicine. The idea that we can't know what's happening inside of our bodies without actually external data points and authority figures telling us. In the conventional medicine model, we're taught to trust external authorities over our own tuition. We're told, you can't possibly know this information.
Erin Holt [00:13:17]:
Don't be. Stay off of Google. Don't be webmding your symptoms. You can't possibly have that. You can't handle this information. There's this parentification. I know better. I have all the answers, not you.
Erin Holt [00:13:30]:
There's this idea that the solution is always outside of us.
Erin Holt [00:16:19]:
In episode 298, which I titled Where Science Meets the Sacred. And by the way, if you're new here and you're picking up what I'm putting down so far, you'll definitely want to dive into these episodes that I'm referencing. I'll be sure to link them up in the show notes for you.
Erin Holt [00:17:00]:
But in that episode, Where Science Meets the Sacred, I discussed how medicine has a long history of telling women that their experience isn't valid, their experience isn't real, and it doesn't matter when your point of view is erased or invalidated, you learn to silence your internal point of view. You might learn to silence your body sense. And when we do that, we lose trust with ourselves. If we're constantly being told that our experience isn't real and it doesn't matter, it creates and it reinforces lack of trust in ourselves. And when we can't trust ourselves, we have no choice but to reach to external authorities and external data points. So it really keeps us hooked in to this whole system. So if practitioners are taking this approach or reinforcing this idea with functional medicine, it doesn't create this paradigm shift that it's purported to be. It's just more of the same.
Erin Holt [00:18:03]:
It's yet another message telling you that what you feel isn't real or what you feel is not to be trusted. Don't trust that body of yours. The external data points know more than you know. And this is the antithesis of what I teach. And it's why I decided to separate myself out slightly from the standard templated, cookie cutter, functional medicine like pop up clinic model as a whole. And I like to label how we practice and what I teach as intuitive functional medicine. With intuitive functional medicine, we're not treating a set of data points. We're not treating a set of lab data.
Erin Holt [00:18:50]:
We are treating the human being. With all your lived experience that exists behind the lab, ultimately, what we're trying to do is lead people back to themselves, lead people back to their own inner healer, and oftentimes teach them that that inner healer even exists because we're taught the exact opposite with the messages that we're receiving from medicine. With intuitive medicine, we're absolutely leveraging the use of functional lab testing, because objective data can be really effective to drive behavior change. Again, more on that next week. But it's not the only tool in our toolbox, and we're not always positioning that tool above the human being's lived experience, because if someone has learned to silence their internal point of view, if someone has lost that awareness, that connection with their body, the solution here isn't to reinforce those feelings of lack of trust by telling them they can never trust themselves. It's to reestablish the lines of communication so that you can build out self trust. You can bring that communication with your body. You can bring that body sense online and just telling somebody, oh, no, no, no, you got to continue to divorce yourself from your body because you can't know how you feel.
Erin Holt [00:20:15]:
How you feel is not an indication of how well you are. You can only get that information through the labs that I deliver, that you pay me for through this concierge service. This is where functional medicine gets a little sketch, I think. So. There's a caveat here. There's a million caveats like I said earlier. One of those caveats is that sometimes labs can actually be an entry point, can help somebody reestablish the lines of communication when they are carefully and skillfully and even artfully leveraged without fear mongering. Without fear mongering.
Erin Holt [00:20:54]:
Okay, one more time. Without fear mongering. As a practitioner, I love objective data. So, again, we run a labs based practice. We do labs all the time. I love the objective data, but and also I love subjective data. Asking people how they feel, what their experience is and listening to that and trusting that.
Erin Holt [00:21:22]:
I believe in an evidence based approach, and I believe that you get to be the evidence. You get to be the evidence. Your experience is evidence. It is valid. How you're feeling is valid, and I would never tell you otherwise. Here's the thing about data. We are more hungry for data than ever before, and we have technology to bring it to us. Very cool.
Erin Holt [00:21:46]:
There's gadgets and gizmos and lab testing aplenty. But what we're seeing, clients come to us with piles of data. Functional labs from other practitioners, maybe information from their CGM, continuous glucose monitor, information from their HRV tracker, food sensitivity testing. Just piles of data points, and they get lost in this sea of data points. They don't know what's right for them. They're like, I've got all of this information, and I still don't know what to do. I still don't know what is correct. I don't know what the path forward is for me.
Erin Holt [00:22:32]:
So we can't just say, oh, you just need more testing. You need more data points, and that will solve all of your problems, because we're seeing that it's not solving all of the problems. And I think the missing link here is that we are not teaching people how to build out the capacity to come home to themselves, how to get in touch with those internal signals coming from within the house, inside the house. And without this ability, most likely people will continue to flounder around, lost in a sea of data points, not really understanding what's relevant and what's not and what to do with the information. Or even worse, they get lost in a sea of data points. They get lost in a sea of functional labs, which stokes the fear flames. And that's what leads me to my next point, which is the fear mongering in functional medicine. This practitioner literally used the iceberg analogy to insinuate that there's this thing lurking beneath the surface that you can't know unless you test for.
Erin Holt [00:23:42]:
It's like staying on guard. Stay vigilant because there is this. There's things going on beneath the surface. Like, yikes. If I heard that, I would be running to the next practitioner who was willing to offer me a lab test, like, find the scary thing. Definitely do that. But is that real? Is that really how we should be thinking about our bodies? Is that thought creating more solutions or more problems? I love what Lyssa Rankin says. She says excessive knowledge about what can go wrong with the body can actually harm you.
Erin Holt [00:24:21]:
The more you focus on the infinite ways in which the body can break down, the more likely you are to experience physical symptoms. So I'm gonna give you. I'm gonna read to you something that somebody just recently DMed us. She said, all right. I had one ND so naturopath run insanely expensive labs on me and tell me everything. Single chemical I had in my blood in a ton of pathogens that could actually be disguised as other pathogens in mimic this and mimic that. The same story for the food sensitivities. I didn't know which one of the millions of terrible things that were going on inside of me is the root cause.
Erin Holt [00:25:04]:
And I went off the deep end mentally for two years. I'm just finally crawling out of that fear hole. I deleted all health accounts on instagram, except for a few non fear mongering ones, obviously, I still have you on here. Well, thank you. When I read stuff like this that people share with me, it's not because they're these random outliers. It's because I'm hearing stuff like this a lot. We're seeing stuff like this a lot. People are coming to our clinic feeling this way.
Erin Holt [00:25:38]:
So this is a pattern. This is something that we're seeing as a byproduct of the way functional medicine is kind of being pushed forward. And I have to ask, are these functional medicine labs in these root cause rabbit holes that people are chasing, creating more on ramps for healing? Is it creating more potential, more opportunity for health and healing? Or is it just another way for people to reinforce the idea that their bodies are broken, that their bodies are untrustworthy, that health is this big, scary thing? Their bodies are scary. Their bodies are something that can turn on a dime. You might think you're healthy. You might be walking down the street feeling good, and you actually don't really know it's lurking beneath the surface. Let me run all of these labs and tell you all of the potential ways that things could go terribly, terribly, terribly wrong.
Erin Holt [00:28:27]:
It's not uncommon for someone to come to functional medicine and get labeled with all sorts of different things that are wrong with them. Leaky gut, mold illness, candida, food allergies, heavy metal toxicity. The list can go on and on, and I recognize, I really do, that this can be soothing and validating for someone who's been searching for the reasons why they feel so terrible to have answers. It's like, hell yeah. But we also have to understand, or at the very least question, what does that do, all of these labels, what does that do to someone's emotional state, their beliefs, their psychology, their limbic system? What type of seeds are we planting? And are we even aware, as the practitioner, that we're planting these seeds? Years ago, I was talking to a former client. I had done hormone testing on her and her hormones, including her stress hormones, cortisol, DHEA, scraping the bottom of the barrel. So it was kind of like a straightforward, true, classic picture of, like, old school adrenal fatigue.
Erin Holt [00:29:38]:
I'm like, yeah. Like, this is a burnout depletion state for show. For show for shizzle. And I was talking to her maybe two or three years later, after. After that initial appointment, and she was talking about her adrenal fatigue. Well, I have adrenal fatigue. She was saying this years later, years later, and it was such a light bulb moment for me.
Erin Holt [00:30:04]:
I was like, whoa, hold up. How did you interpret what I said? What seed did I plant with the delivery of that data. When I was going over the lab, how did I articulate the data to her in such a way that I planted this seed that adrenal fatigue is something that she's going to have to deal with forever and ever and ever. It's something that she's always going to have to contend with. And it really, really made me think about how, and I'm so lucky that this happened, really, in the beginning of when I started running functional labs. I'm so grateful that this happened where I got this, like, light bulb moment of understanding that how I communicate lab results with clients can absolutely impact their capacity, their ability to heal. Of course, as practitioners, we can't be fully responsible for how our clients perceive or interpret our words, but we can take the time to build enough rapport to understand their background, to understand their backstory enough so we might be able to curate our delivery of the data to that individual, to that person. This is why, as an aside, I often talk about functional labs as an art form. It's their skill. You have to understand how to interpret things, but it's also an art and how you communicate that information to somebody.
Erin Holt [00:31:34]:
The reason I talk so much about subconscious beliefs and filters, if you've been listening to the show over the past couple of months, we really talked about that a lot, lot, lot, lot. But all of that can filter how someone receives the information. And so we might be unintentionally feeding into a harmful narrative or unintentionally planting a harmful seed of belief of, like, there's no chance of recovery from this. So we all know about the placebo effect. The placebo effect is so real, it's so validated, that it has to be accounted for in all studies. So it's a big deal. And the placebo effect is essentially saying what you believe, what you're told about something, can impact the physical reaction you have. So there's been studies on sham surgeries, for example, where it was a pretend surgery, but people thought they were getting a surgery on their knee, and their knee pain got better because they believed they received the surgery.
Erin Holt [00:32:35]:
So it was their belief that actually created the physical result, the physical reaction. Now, there's also something known as the nocebo effect, which is just as real as the placebo effect, where people can experience a negative outcome based on what they're told. Here's an example. There's a small study where college students were hooked up to monitors. They were told that an electric current would be passed through their heads, and the participants were warned ahead of time that they might experience a headache as a side effect. So there was no volts, there was no electric currents that were actually used. But more than two thirds of students reported headaches. This is one of the things that I think is most overlooked in functional medicine.
Erin Holt [00:33:26]:
If you tell somebody something negative about their health and they believe it, the likelihood that they will have negative physical reactions is high. There's this idea that a diagnosis or labeling of any kind can be a medical hexing. When someone is told they have a chronic incurable illness that can program in their subconscious mind, labeling somebody with a negative prognosis, the power of suggestion, the power of belief, can actually prove that negative prognosis true. So let me give you an example. This came just last week from somebody who's currently in Manifest Your Health with me. She said, I had my annual gyno appointment today when the topic of my previous PCOS diagnosis and potential remission came up. My doctor said, oh, no, PCOS is something that you'll have forever. That just pulls any potential for healing right off of the table. Any hope gets pulled off of the table as soon as a doctor says that.
Erin Holt [00:34:27]:
And luckily, this person's been listening to me for a long time, listening to the podcast, the Manifest Your Health series, and she's in manifest your health. And she's like, I have the opportunity to just delete statement from my mind that doesn't have to be true for me. Another person in Manifest Your Health said, my functional medicine doctor said, SIBO is just something that you'll have forever. You'll have to treat it every single year. This is a big, bold statement. That's a huge seed that just got planted, that SIBO is essentially incurable. We're never going to really get rid of this. You'll always have this thing. Yikes.
Erin Holt [00:35:00]:
Big yikes. You know, I've had Mark Pimentel on the show before. Doctor Mark Pimentel, he's great, and he works with a lot of very, very, very severe and challenging SIBO cases. And I recognize that there are some situations where SIBO is likely to come back, and we've seen in our own practice that it doesn't have to always come back. So there's multiple truths here, and it's really important that the practitioner is able to deliver multiple truths instead of one truth of, oh, you're just going to have this forever, period. And I think that this is one of those places where sometimes functional medicine can create more problems than it solves. For here's the deal. The more tests you run on someone, the more things you can find wrong, and the more labels you will be able to give someone.
Erin Holt [00:35:59]:
Here's the other thing. These functional medicine labs, they're not infallible. Even the ones that I use and love and teach other clinicians how to use in FNA, they're not perfect. I think a great practitioner is able to understand that we can use these tools. We can also understand that they're not perfect. Food sensitivities. For example, sometimes depending on the test, sometimes food sensitivity test is just showing you what you're eating. It doesn't necessarily mean your immune system is having a negative reaction to it. So clients will come to us, pulled off a bunch of foods due to a food sensitivity test.
Erin Holt [00:36:36]:
And with the nocebo effect, if someone is told that they're reacting to a food, they're going to be more likely to actually react to that food. So if we are using an imperfect and, sometimes, inaccurate lab to tell somebody, oh, you're definitely going to have a problem with this, the person's going to hear that in the likelihood that they will definitely have a problem with that is pretty darn high. Why? Let's use mold tests as another example. Mold tests can show you that you've had mold exposure and that you're excreting mold mycotoxins from your body, but it doesn't necessarily indicate mold illness. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're sick from mold. I love what Bradon Vermeer says. He says everyone has mold exposure. Not everyone has mold illness.
Erin Holt [00:37:25]:
So sometimes mold exposure is absolutely a root cause. But sometimes somebody can have a positive MycoTOX test, and they can be totally fine. So if somebody comes to me and they say, I feel great, I feel amazing, I feel totally fine, and they have this positive MycoTOX test. Let's just use this as an example. I would defer to how the person is feeling over the lab data. A few years ago, we tested our well water. We had pretty hard water. We wanted to get a whole home filtration system.
Erin Holt [00:37:57]:
So we had our well water tested, and it showed high levels of arsenic and uranium in our drinking water. And so obviously, we got the filtration system to make sure that we took care of that. But I also ran a heavy metals urine test just to see. Out of curiosity, is this in our body? Our bodies, my family and I. And on the test, it showed elevated levels of these two metals in our urine, arsenic and uranium. So what does that mean? That means I have exposure and my body is excreting it out. So that's actually kind of a good sign because I felt fine at the time, and I knew we were removing the source of the exposure. I didn't really sweat this.
Erin Holt [00:38:42]:
I wasn't like, oh, my gosh, I have heavy metal toxicity. I ramped up my family's detox support a little bit, but that was really it, because we removed the source. Now, I think if I think back to when I was frantically searching for a root cause, I had the belief that my body is a broken thing. It is a broken thing, and I didn't really understand my capacity for healing at that time, years ago. If that was a lab, let's say I had gone to a functional medicine practitioner, and they had run a bunch of things, searching for, like, just kind of, like, recklessly searching for all the root causes, casting a wide net, doing all the labs. And if I had received this lab with high arsenic and high uranium, I probably would have panicked.
Erin Holt [00:39:30]:
I definitely would have attached to the label of heavy metal toxicity. I would have googled all of the symptoms associated with heavy metal toxicity, I most likely, knowing myself back then, would have started to experience those exact symptoms. I probably would have put myself or allowed a practitioner to put me on some type of crazy heavy metal detox that I most likely didn't need, and it for sure would have stoked a lot of anxiety and a lot of fear. So I say all of this because context really matters. Our symptoms really matter. How we're feeling in our body really matters. They're part of overall context clues. I am not saying that functional lab testing should never be used.
Erin Holt [00:40:25]:
I am not saying that people don't have root causes to why they're feeling like trash. But I am saying that how somebody is feeling should be taken into consideration when we are looking at their overall health case. When we are interpreting these lab testing, how somebody is feeling is not irrelevant data. It is a data point. And we can and we must include and invalidate how somebody is feeling into the overall picture when we're working with them. All right, I don't want to get too rambly here. Ramble on, Rose, but these are all things to consider. And if this is the type of practitioner that you want to work with on your health, then I suggest doing one of my programs or working one on one with someone on my team because we can help you out. And if this is the type of practitioner you want to be, then I suggest you study with me in the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy.
Erin Holt [00:41:19]:
And again, we are open for enrollment. So check us out and then come back next week because we'll talk about the benefits of functional lab testing in why I love them. But we had to preface that whole conversation with this one today. All right, I'll check you next week. Love you guys. Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Funk'tional Nutrition Podcast. If you got something from today's show, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.
