Learn What Lab Results Mean

It is critical to know and remember that having normal test results gives America normal health results. Last year it was normal that about 500,000 American died of heart disease. I finally decided I wanted to be much better than normal, and you should too. It takes a while to digest and get all of this stuff integrated in your head. A good way to think about what you need to achieve is like a video game where you need to ring up various scores in different categories to win.

You win in this game by having better scores than normal to allow your body to repair itself. Working with your doctor, you can modify your scores over time by taking medicine, dieting and exercising routinely. You may need to start heavier with medicines in the beginning but you will be amazed at the difference when you lose a weight and begin to exercise what it does to your lab scores. In my case, I started taking Lipitor at 40 MGS daily. I am now taking Lipitor at 5 MGS daily; my physician actually explained that my bad cholesterol was too low! You can get this result too and it is something you should strive to do.

I am making my blood test results available to you for educational reasons. After you learn what the important tests are and the results you should want you too will be able to point out just how predictable it was that I would develop cardiovascular heart disease. In my case, I was able to capture some important data from records I had sense to maintain and the story is effectively told by displaying it in time oriented fashion.

It almost blew me away when I inserted the coronary events into the display. I encourage you to review my test results and use it as a model for reconstructing your own history. I have made my record available as an Excel download. I would also be willing to e-mail it to you upon request. If it would motivate you to do so, I would also create a web page specifically for you here on this website. Several of our sponsors have this service available and your physician's office may also have a referral to help you. Do anything you need to do to gather up this information and look at it to read your own story.

Of course the exciting part is future oriented and I view this as one type of scorecard to determine my disease regression or progression. I advocate publishing and showing your information to others as a way to claim your progress and share with friends and family the how and why of whatever program you have set out for yourself. Putting it out there is also part of my personal plan for keeping myself motivated. Any edge you can find to help with the motivation should be optimized!

I indicated blood test results is one type of scorecard. There are shortcomings of how we report and evaluate these kinds of tests. The relativity that I find is mostly involved with the interpretation of the tests and what does it say about one's exactly medical condition. An excellent example of this problem is if the blood test results are so good why have I not seen more significant improvement. I was faced with this exact situation and by sharing it hopefully you can save two years of reversal time!

The normal manner of taking a blood test requires us to not eat after midnight the night before our test. If we do not cheat then we are said to be in a "fasting state" and the results are reported on that basis. On a fasting basis, I could not have received better test result scores. But here is the fallacy; a "fasting state" is but one moment in time. What happens the other 23 hours and 59 minutes per day? It turns out that by faulty logic on my behalf I fell victim to post postprandial lipid surges. These things are actually why we need to adopt an extremely low fat diet. Specifically, I thought since I was doing so well on my blood tests that buttered popcorn, oatmeal cookies and olive oil clearly were things that I could eat. My test were normal weren't they?

The take away message about understanding labs test and their results is you need to know them and what exactly your score might be at any point in time. The second part of the message is there is no such thing as "my cholesterol is a little high".