When “Normal” Isn’t Normal: Understanding Your Blood Results Beyond the GP’s Reference Range

We live within a medical system that is brilliant in many ways — life-saving, essential, and staffed by GPs who are doing their absolute best with the tools they’ve been given. I know and respect many GPs; this isn’t about blame.  It is about a system that was never designed for prevention.

Standard medical training is compartmentalised: thyroid over here, hormones over there, gut in another room entirely. And unless something is glaringly broken — unless your glucose is sky-high, your thyroid is tanking, or your iron is profoundly low — you’re often told that everything is “fine.”  But what about when you don’t feel fine?

What about the fatigue, the brain fog, the month-to-month hormonal chaos, the creeping symptoms that whisper before they scream?  GPs are not taught holistic, systems-based medicine. They’re taught to diagnose and treat disease using pharmaceuticals — not to identify early dysfunction, explore root causes, or understand the interconnectedness of the body’s systems.  This is the gap. This is where so many people fall through the cracks.

Most people have had this experience:

Your iron is low → take iron.

Your vitamin D is low → take vitamin D.

Your B12 is tanked → take a supplement or get an injection.

And yes — sometimes supplementation is appropriate.  But it’s also a bandaid if we’re never asked the more important question:

Why was it low?

Why is your iron dropping?

Why is your vitamin D plummeting even in summer?

Why is your B12 depleted despite eating animal foods?

When we don’t address the root cause, the imbalance doesn’t disappear — it simply shifts. It finds another pathway to express itself. Eventually, symptoms get loud enough that they become “medical,” and then the system finally springs into action.

What if we intervened earlier?

What if we listened to the whispers before they became screams?

Normal Lab Results vs Optimal Lab Results

This is the heart of functional medicine. A patient can feel exhausted, foggy, bloated, depressed, anxious, inflamed, or hormonally chaotic… and still be told:

“Your bloods are normal.”

Here’s why:

Standard reference ranges were designed to detect disease — not to optimise health.  They reflect statistical averages of the population, including many people who are unwell. Functional medicine takes a different approach. It interprets labs using optimal ranges— narrower, research-backed ranges that reflect ideal physiological function. These can reveal early imbalances long before they hit the “disease” threshold.

Functional medicine doesn’t look at markers in isolation. Instead, it asks:

How do your results relate to your symptoms?

What is the pattern across systems?

Where is the imbalance starting, and why?

My Story: The System Failed to Ask “Why?”

Recently, I went to my GP with a cluster of symptoms I had tracked over months. I knew something was 'off'.

My labs came back and my B12 was completely tanked... And the advice? “Take a supplement.”

No exploration of why.

No question of absorption.

No discussion of methylation, gut health, intrinsic factor, the microbiome, or stress physiology.

My hormone results were never discussed.

When I got home and reviewed my results myself, they told a completely different story.  I couldn't believe how much was missed in the interpretation of these results! When in the GP's office, I mentioned minimal weight gain as one symptoms. And then — the wild part. The conversation immediately shifted to Ozempic.

Not why my hormones were dysregulated.

Not why my B12 was tanked, D was low, homeocystine was high etc....

Not how to support ovulation, gut health, liver clearance, stress load, or metabolic resilience.

Just: here’s a drug.

And this is exactly what I mean — the system is built to treat disease, not investigate imbalance.

We Deserve Better than Waiting for Disease

Imagine a world where:

People are taught how to understand their own results

Prevention is prioritised

Small symptoms matter

Root causes are explored

Optimal ranges guide early intervention

Body sovereignty is normal

Collaboration between GP + functional care is the standard

This is not anti-GP.

This is pro-patient.

Pro-prevention.

Pro-truth.

And it starts with you.

Your Body, Your Data, Your Sovereignty

You have the right to:

Request blood tests

Receive copies of your results

Ask questions

Seek second opinions

Learn how to interpret your labs

Choose practitioners who look at the full picture

Be curious about imbalances before they become illnesses

Your body speaks long before disease shows up. And you are absolutely capable of understanding what it’s trying to say. The Point Is Simple….

The medical system is not designed to catch early dysfunction.

It was built to diagnose disease.

Functional medicine, holistic care, and preventive approaches fill that gap by asking bigger questions:

Why did this happen?

How are your systems interacting?

What is your body trying to tell you?

How can we support you before things escalate?

This is the future of healthcare.

And it begins with awareness, education, empowerment, and the willingness to question what “normal” really means.