The Dr. Hyman Show - Office Hours: The Blood Tests That Actually Matter for Your Health

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

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

Welcome to office hours. This is our dedicated one-on-one space to go deeper, get clear, 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 in agency than you realize. I'm glad you're here. This episode is brought to you by Function Health, empowering you to live with you.

100 healthy years with over 160 lab tests at just $365 a year. Sign up today at functionhealth.com slash mark and use code Mark 2026 to get $50 towards your membership. Imagine spending hundreds, maybe even $1,000 on your blood work, only for your doctor to look to 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.

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, quote, 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, order. 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 is missing something. So let me tell you why understanding labs are important and why understanding how 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.

It doesn't just happen from one day or the next that you get sick. You get sick slowly, invisibly, pre-symptomatically, asymptomatically, asymptomatic, asymptomatically until one day you got started 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 to 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 and the tires, you need the right chewing for your steering wheel, you need I don't know, I'm not like 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 are abnormal if you're about to die.

like 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, they're pretty useless and mostly don't show anything. In fact, the annual checkup as is currently done has been scientifically shown to be pretty much useless. So, and what they 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.

Now, I co-founded a company called Function Health to really help empower people to be the CEO on their own health, to understand what's going on under the hood, to have agency over their health, to be the CEO of their 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 might not know about. And I mean, you could have diabetes and not know it. You could have 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 once 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 stick it in very rarely signs of metabolic dysfunction, for example, like where they're heading for diabetes or Alzheimer's risk or obviously cardiovascular risk, hormonal dysfunction, and nutritional diseases and deficiencies are really common that often

would lead to problems later on. So most of us are walking around with these blinds busts. 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 have this subtle symptoms or it's kind of just how we are. And I call it the FLC syndrome when we feel like crap. 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 an irritable bowel or I'm a little depressed or whatever. These are things we 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, yes, we want to test. And that's what I would say. test, don't guess. 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 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, a no other 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 help, 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 at every system in your body. Not listening to looking for disease, but also looking for imbalances that lead 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, like, 1-15, which was 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'll follow it. And when it gets to the diabetes range, we'll give him medication. And I'm like, that is the worst approach. You want to be the opposite of that.

And really, function health was created out of this need for, at least what I believe, and the co-foundish 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 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, are looking for Alzheimer's order.

disease or allergies or other things you might want to look at in 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 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 it 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

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 in the pattern. 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. 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 average in the population, you do two standard variations 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. And we want to look at what's optimal, not what's normal. And just to help you understand this, if you were to land in America and you would 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, you're fine. We want to look at what is optimal? What is an optimal lab range? In other words, your vitamin D on the 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 breath strain changes are showing you a number of 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, your risk 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 of vitamin D was over 50, there was zero deaths in that population, zero. So we need to look at what's optimal, not which is normal. So the conventional lab ranges just miss this early dysfunction. Like in other words, we keep, we keep sure, the goalposts. You talk about hypertension. Then we talk about prehypertension. And we talk about

prediabetes. We talk about autoimmune disease. We talk about autoimmune disease. Well, it's not pre-anything anything. These are just early disturbances that are leading you on that path. So if your blood sugar is normal, it's 70 to 100. But whatever you're 99. That's not really optimal. It should be probably between 70 and 87, according to the literature, because 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 had surgery. I was anemic. I needed to check my blood count. It was low. I got a blood transfusion. You know, that's good. It's helpful. 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, that's 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, that the way they check it is really outdated and meaningless. That's the one kind of thing they're looking at

in the screening, but it's basically a reaction. If you have cholesterol, I'll 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. You 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 weight gain, you know, you're struggling with waking. Why? We may have normal blood sugar, but your insulin levels might be sky high. You 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 methyl acid, which are the better test to check for B12 of folate. Or maybe you have low omega-3 fats, which we check, and that can lead to, obviously,

depression if you have low omega-3. So joint pain is the same thing. Maybe you have gluten sensitivity. maybe we 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 test 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 TSA. And that can be, quote, normal, but the range there is 0.5 to 5. Now, that's not actually good because according to the American College of Maticronology,

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 actual thyroid hormones because TSA 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 four. And that can be for a lot of reasons like selenium deficiency or mercury poisoning or yeast overgrowth or toxins. 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 that can happen from chronic disease. So you might have normal looking thyroid, but your reverse T3 is high and you're basically thyroid's not working. You can 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's 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 or I'm low constipated or my sex drive 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 t-shage 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. And if you look deeply, and this is why we've done this,

and we've 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. We look at everything together. There's something I need everyone to know. You can have, quote, normal cholesterol and still be at serious risk for heart attack. Because with your standard annual exam, you get a few basic heart markers checked and you carry on. But cholesterol is just one piece of the puzzle. The most important tests are missing.

Like APOB. Have you ever had that done? Probably not. It helps move cholesterol in the bloodstream and is a powerful marker for your risk of cardiovascular disease. Or HSCRP, which is a marker of systemic inflammation in the body. These are some of the tests that give warning signs years before symptoms show up. And that's why we built function over 160 lab tests, including a cardiovascular panel that goes way beyond basic cholesterol.

And all in one check for your entire body for just $365 a year. So you track your data and you take control at functionhealth.com. 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 tests may 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 other issues like high uric acid. You might have inflammation on high CRP. You can see these patterns 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 just one big system and everything affects everything.

So when you really look at what functions doing, it's really providing you with a deep, comprehensive picture of your biology in the moment and then longitudinally over time, and it helps you understand what those patterns are, 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 there's low in vitamin D, you could be getting more frequent infections and colds. You could be having seasonal affect disorder or the winter blues. You could have mothers. muscle aches and pains. You can 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 core labs that everybody should know about and should track in their bodies, right? And what do they tell you?

I mean, if 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 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 the reference range, and the optimum range is probably 70 to 85, not like up to 100. Now, if you go to 100 to 126 as 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, sugar cravings, you might feel crashes up and down with your energy after meals, like hypoglycemic, you have brain fog, you're tired, and you might have many, many other symptoms do, like diseases, but those are symptoms that are common, 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 has been around for about 40 years, but still hasn't been adopted because it takes decades for things for, 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 the major cause is metabolic dysfunction, which is related to blood sugar, but there are other causes. And we look at your inflammation level, something called HSCRP, which is a cytokine or molecule that liver makes it is related to inflammation. We look at ferretin, which can be an iron storage marker, but if it's high, it also is an inflammation marker. We also look at your blood count and your white count and your white cells and all those tell a lot 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 this creates this quiet, silent, 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 inflammation, 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, but really important. And a lot of people are going to 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 for many cause will cause weight gains. For example, you have a gut issue and you have bad bugs in your gut, and they're producing inflammatory molecules.

You can gain weight independent of having a crappy diet because it'll just drive inflammation All right, let's talk about cholesterol. Chlesterol is one of those things that, you know, doctors check, everybody gets it. It's standard, but they don't do the right test. 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 triglycerized, 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 us a very different picture of what's going on. So you can have a 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 can have a really high cholesterol and it's made up of all the good particles and done a lot of them and you're totally vined. So you can't really tell what's going on with your heart,

cholesterol, or disease risk, without doing the right cholesterol test. And function health does that. Now, we also test other things that doctors miss. We look at APOB, 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'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 I'm going to look for it. Now, the thing about hard disease is, I don't want to scare people, but the first symptom of heart attack and heart disease, for 50% of the people to have it, you know what it is? Sudden death. You literally drop dead of a heart attack and you have no idea it's coming. Literally no idea.

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 they don't know how bad their heart disease. At 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 of heart disease. breath and you know he didn't think any issues when got checked you had a full occlusion and he has really bad lipid particles so really important to get this diagnostics early and manage it you can be managed true lifestyle you can manage your supplements sometimes medications are needed but really important to manage risk well let's look at thyroid we talked a little bit about that early I won't go too much into it but you know it's important to the full panel of thyroid tests including TSA 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 TSA, probably the optimal should be like 1 to 2. 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 can have 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 throat of your eyebrows and all kinds of stuff that just don't really maybe seem serious, but that are serious because if you have it untreated, you actually will end up having a higher risk of having heart attacks and other conditions later in life. 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, because you've got about 40 trillion cells, every single one of those chemical reactions needs a helper, an enzyme 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 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-3s, folate, B-12, minerals, a lot, lots of more.

We can check all kinds of things. but you really want to get a good basic picture. We do that on the basic function panel, but it's also add-on 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. We also look at things that can relate to emerald gut function.

You know, things like iron absorption may be low, beach well 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 tied as I mentioned to your microbiome. So all these things are really related and are really 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. The irritable bowel is caused by an 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 bloating, constipation, diarrhea, reflux, food sensitivities, all these things

we can start to manage and check for. So let's talk about how we read labs differently from the perspective of understanding the body is a system or a network, the root cause medicine, some people got a 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 result 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 on a lab test? Do you have like megaloblastic anemia that comes from severe B12 deficiency? Maybe not. But maybe you have a subtle change in the size of your red blood cells that's creeping up that indicates that you might have a V12 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 into 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 are particle size, particle number. All these things really help you identify what's going on.

And they're beautiful because we can actually not just measure one point in time, 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 in a sense, what's your optimal, what's your baseline? 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 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 download the flow version. You can see it on the dashboard. But you really want to, to go and see your doctor, you want to look at your labs.

You also want to compare your results to optimal range, just normal. So in all the content for function, in 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 the year based on what the issues are or 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. And this is the key, you know, am I heading in the right direction? What's borderline, but still important,

and 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 is 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 to measure, track, and empower yourself with long-term data and insights from the world's top doctors and scientists and the world's 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 really super easy to understand, and it's really elegant, and I encourage you to check it out. You go to Functionhealth.com slash mark and check it out. Now, if this episode sparks 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, someone doesn't feel well, but it 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 charge, keep asking questions, and keep showing up for your health. 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 guest's 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 professional.

This podcast is provided with the understanding that it 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 Ultra Wellness Center.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.