LABORATORY INVESTIGATIONS
To treat you successfully we must find out what is going on with your biochemistry.
Disease names are just labels e.g., fibromyalgia, ‘new daily persistent headache’, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis…. I could go on and on.
The ‘diagnostic label’ really refers to a collection of symptoms (what a patient suffers from), clinical findings (what the clinician finds on examination) and laboratory findings. In standard medicine, the clinician then prescribes the standard treatment to reduce or eliminate symptoms, and hopefully to reduce the pace of disease progression. The standard approach does not drill down to explore what is happening biologically, so as to attempt to fix that. This is the aim of Functional Medicine.
When investigating and diagnosing you at Drummartin Clinic we try our best to find the root cause of all your symptoms.
How we investigate:
We will investigate your medical problems as comprehensively as possible, using the best and most sophisticated means at our disposal. We use both standard and non-standard investigations.
Standard investigations:
We use local hospitals and laboratories to assess haematology, biochemistry and endocrinology. For many of our female patients, basic endocrinology testing is very important in the diagnostic process.
Non-Standard investigations:
Ireland is too small a population base to provide local availability of specialised laboratory testing, so we use laboratories in the UK, Europe and the U.S. for non-standard tests.
Non-standard investigations include:
- Toxicology for chemicals and pesticides
- Toxicology for heavy metals
- Urinary organic acid markers for bacterial gut infections, how pressurized the detoxification system is, and mitochondrial indicators
- Toxicology for fungal toxins/mycotoxins
- Infective disease profiles including Borrelia and viral infection
- Walsh Research Institute Brain Nutrient profiling
- Food intolerance testing