Doctor's Note: September 19
Doctor's Note: Musings from the desk of Dr. Mitchell Rasmussen, D.C.When I sit down to work with somebody, it is often a complicated picture. They come in with a few dozen or more current ongoing symptoms. They’ve been to numerous providers, tried many things, and often need things simplified. They may be super into labs, and I am too. BUT, we need to start with the basic understanding of this: Everything is connected, everybody is different, and everything matters (but not everything is important right now). To understand your energy, we need to understand your sleep, exercise, eating patterns, hormones, stress, medications/supplements on board, etc. We need to understand how numerous drivers contribute to energy issues. This idea remains for any other issues you’re facing. Choices drive outcomes. Choices are.. well… choices. We can change them. When I work to help somebody with their health, I think about what to do based on information we get from these 4 inputs: Patient History, Presenting Complaints, Lab Results, and Responses to Intervention.1) What is your medical and family history? Health conditions tend to run in families. Is this purely genetics or maybe the fact that CHOICES and habits and traumas also tend to run in families?! To understand where to go from here, we need to get a grasp of where you’ve been and what kind of things might run in your family. 2) What are you currently dealing with? Broadly: how many symptoms do you have and what are your current lifestyle habits? 3) Results of lab data. This is key, but not the most important thing to look at; in my opinion. Labs are just one piece of the puzzle. A solid history guides this piece, and we use labs to either disprove or prove our various hypotheses. And we will probably start with blood work, then consider layering in further data, like more comprehensive hormone panels, organic acids testing, stool testing, heavy metal testing, mycotoxin or tickborne or viral illness testing, sinus microbiome testing, etc. I believe that a clinician with poor judgment or little experience is a clinician who begins with each patient running ‘the kitchen sink’. We shouldn’t need $2,000 in lab results to be able to begin the process of unwinding your problems. We can gain more data as your picture unwinds itself, if we hit bumps in the road, or we aren’t finding enough drivers of your problems in order to confidently help you eliminate them. 4) Responses to thoughtful low-risk interventions. How you respond to the changes we begin with helps inform the next series of changes. This is so important. When we clean out obvious ‘low-hanging fruit’, where does that leave us? Then, we keep making changes based on this new information we glean. This is why we often want to see you more frequently in the beginning. You might not respond favorably to everything we ask you to change. This information is valuable. Health can feel overwhelming when you’re carrying dozens of symptoms and a trail of half-answers. But it gets much simpler when we zoom out, connect the dots, and then work through them one at a time. My role is to help you identify what matters most right now—so you can take action without drowning in noise. P.S. New Episodes of FACILITATED release every Tuesday! Make sure you're subscribed on your favorite podcast platform. I wax poetic about these four pillars of decision making in Episode 24: "Needle in Hay: Finding What Matters with Vibrant Wellness Labs" Completely unrelated, but don't want to miss an opportunity to tell you about it... |