Understanding you, not just your labs
If you’ve ever seen a Naturopath or Functional Medicine doctor, you may have had this experience. You come in chronically ill, exhausted, non-functional. You fill out boatloads of paperwork that is minimally reviewed, and then you get sent out for thousands of dollars’ worth of lab tests. You wait weeks for the results, and when they do come back, they are accompanied by a “treatment plan” that tells you exactly what to do to correct each lab value that is off. Usually that consists of multiple supplements for each flagged lab, and it’s up to you to take this list of interventions and figure out how to implement them in your life.
You will never have that experience at Shark Holistic Health. Labs are wonderful tools to gather clues about your health, but they are no replacement for the gold standard of diagnosis: a thorough patient history. And how to you get a thorough patient history? Well first, it involves listening.
I must admit that we also give new patients a boatload of paperwork, but in our clinic, that paperwork does not replace time spent listening to you. You are the expert on your body, your history and your experience. We take the time to listen to you to understand exactly what is going on. Many important clues are buried in that conversation, clues that paperwork and lab tests may not reveal.
Lab tests can offer all kinds of wonderful information about what may be going on under the surface, inside your body, but you are not a collection of negative and positive lab results. You are a human person with a body, and inside that body you have multiple systems that are interdependent. That means that labs individually do not tell the story. The lab results need to be looked at together, as a collection of information and then that needs to be looked at together with your paperwork and history. This is the only way to discover a comprehensive understanding of the root causes or functional deficits that are playing the driving role in your current illness.
Because of our backgrounds in Chinese Medicine, Functional Medicine, Paramedicine and Nutrition, we are able to put the puzzle together to help you understand the real underlying conditions and exactly what you need to do to heal them.
