Why Functional Medicine Labs, Supplements & Herbal Medicine Keep You Stuck

As a licensed acupuncturist, herbalist and holistic health practitioner I’d never thought I’d feel so strongly about talking about this topic as somebody who was once quite enthusiastic about the functional medicine space, supplements over drugs, and herbs as medicine.

But the more I have studied the body and health, the more I have realized and experienced with myself and my own clients, that it is simple inputs, consistently, that provide the path to radical health and healing. In my experience the people I meet who are on a path of functional medicine or naturopathic lab testing, supplements and herbs are on a never ending loop of chasing “healing”. And I speak on this because it’s something that has become quite relevant with the experiences of clients I have been meeting over the past two years or so as an interest in holistic medicine has grown quite significantly. 

Disclaimer: The information provided in this blog is for educational purposes only and is not intended to be taken as medical advice nor to diagnose, treat, or cure disease. Chelsey Mollin, Lac does not diagnose, cure or treat disease.

Functional Medicine Labs

Look, I’m not saying these are never helpful, but I don’t find them to be that helpful most of the time for the types of people coming through my door. I will say that I am a bit biased because my background is in traditional chinese medicine, so I am trained to understand somebody’s patterns and symptoms and identify root causes through observation and thoroughly collecting information through the client interaction. People’s patterns are SO obvious when I have the opportunity to get to know them. I don’t need a dutch lab to know that you have excess estrogen and low progesterone and that your cortisol levels are out of whack. A dutch hormone test does not tells us WHY you’re having the symptoms you’re having. The story of your life is what tells us that. The symptoms are the roadmap to fix it. For certain circumstances and particularly tough cases these technologies are absolutely helpful, but for most presentations of chronic issues I see, I’m not sure how much they really move the needle. 

How I explain this to clients is that the testing won’t change the treatment plan. And while it can be great to have objective information in some cases, in my experience I find that is just reinforces the story of sickness and disease more to the client, when what they really need to focus on (if they really want to get better) is providing the environment for healing through their everyday life. It also puts them on an ever ending quest to find answers through testing, rather than looking inside themselves. And when you can step back and understand your body, you’ll see the answers are all right there. They’ll feel better, but they’ll want to “check” their labs to make sure. Or they wont feel better and they’ll want to test to see what’s missing even though it’s right there in front of us in the details of your life. My work is all about connecting to your own body. You don’t need labs to tell you when you’re sick or when you’re well. Healing is about focusing on health and healing, not chasing and focusing on the problem. 

(I actually was going to school for functional medicine to get my PhD in functional medicine, but I quit 1.5 years in because it really just wasn’t in alignment with my approach and I didn’t find that what I was learning was helping me help people at all. I enrolled because I wanted to learn and understand the body better, but what it ended up feeling like was allopathic medicine rebranded – symptom management but with different tools. It still felt rooted in fear and rooted in lab testing and supplements and mold and parasites etc…not much rooted in the truth of the innate intelligence of the body or how to actually achieve vitality, longevity and coherence. It sounds better than current conventional care… but it still over rides the body and doesn’t help people create sovereignty or get all the way better. So I quit! And this is all said with no hate to FMD’s or ND’s, I genuinely believe we all do our best with our best understanding of the truth and the information we have, this is just my experience and I recognize there are amazing practitioners out there in addition to what I am referencing <3 )

I share this from a place of wanting to see people feel better and understand their body’s. I’ve met too many people who pour time, money and energy into protocols that only bring partial and temporarily relief. My goal isn’t to dismiss tools that have helped people but to offer a clearer and more simple path towards lasting vitality that I know people are seeking!

Supplements

Again, it’s not that supplements are never helpful, but supplements are just that – a SUPPLEMENT. They are not meant to replace anything. This conversation really stems off of the functional medicine lab one – because a typical situation is that labs will show you that you are deficient in x, then the treatment plan will be to supplement x. Vs fixing WHY one was deficient in x in the first place. Or the tests will show you x hormone is too high, so the treatment plan will be to lower x hormone with a supplement. Nutrients and hormones don’t work in isolation, and they don’t resolve in isolation. 

This becomes particularly problematic when the functional medicine protocol starts involving an enmeshment of pharmaceutical drugs in combination with herbs and supplements. A great example of this is SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth) when the client/patient will go for gut mapping tests, but then be prescribed antibiotics. The presence of bacteria in the small intestine doesn’t explain WHY the person is experiencing bloating, food sensitivities, pain, constipation, diarrhea etc. And the use of antibiotics to wipe out those bacteria won’t resolve this problem. And now you’re stuck on a loop of not feeling well → test the gut → find the bacteria → antibiotics → feel better for a bit → feel sick again → test again → bacteria came back → back on antibiotics…. 

The only thing alternative about this approach is the tests being utilized. Your health is simple, and in my opinion this approach makes it feel very complicated, difficult and mysterious. (Remember when I said your patterns are so obvious!! …so is the path to fix them)

Another great example is digestive enzymes. When somebody has a bunch of digestive symptoms they will typically be recommended digestive enzymes. An alternative that is without a doubt a better and safer option than a proton pump inhibitor (like prilosec) They will make your stomach feel better, but they won’t address why you are not producing stomach acid on your own, or why you are not moving your bowels on your own. 

This becomes a never ending chase of test → supplement → test →  supplement → test supplement → get 50% better, 60% better, maybe even 80% better, but never 100% – and never when you take the supplements away. 

Not to mention all the money people spend on supplements and these labs. And look I’m not saying don’t spend money on your health, nor is it inexpensive to work with me, but the goal should be to not need to continue to do all of this. It should be an investment that has a significant and infinite return – your abundant health and vitality. 

I’ve watched the functional medicine and holistic space grow so quickly over the years and while I have my critiques I will also say that it feels like a natural pendulum swing and natural over correction from a conventional western approach to an alternative approach. My hope is that people will start to land somewhere more in the middle so they can actually heal & thrive!

Just recently I had a new client who was working with a naturopath and was taking a whole bunch of supplements and herbs. She had high cortisol amongst other measurable issues and was looking for help addressing the patterns that caused her to have extreme post menstrual symptoms post partum/post breast feeding. She was also wanting to heal from and eventually come off the drugs she had been prescribed to address this initially. When I met her she was going to an intense hot yoga class 3x/week first thing in the morning. I knew right away I wanted to recommend she stopped doing this. The class was not in her best interest for all kinds of reasons…the intensity, the sweating, the time of day, the fact that it was Winter +++. It was a recipe for hormonal chaos for her particular circumstances.

Reluctantly she stopped going even though she loved it so much… and within a week she started to feel better in different areas. Her stomach felt better, her skin looked better, she felt like she looked and felt better than ever… just from that one simple shift 🙂

My point is, that she could take all the cortisol and nervous system supplements in the world… and keep checking labs for her cortisol and trying different protocols…but 3x/ week all month long she was damaging her cortisol, amongst other things, and subsequently affecting all other hormones and just overall stressing her body out when it was already stressed.

Read more in this blog about why cortisol isn’t at all the enemy – it just needs to be regulated 🙂

Herbal Medicine

I’m a board certified herbalist trained in traditional Chinese medicine. Herbs are an incredible medicine…but they don’t work unless you change WHY the dis ease was there in the first place. Yes they will make you feel better even if you don’t change anything, but only temporarily. You have to resolve these patterns at their root. 

I work with women a lot and a pattern I see is women with PMS/PMDD issues and painful periods are taking herbs that manipulate steroid sex hormones (estrogen, progesterone, testosterone) but these hormones don’t work in isolation. So not only does manipulating these hormones with herbs not resolve the patterns at the root, but eventually you’re going to start to have other issues as well because of the way you’ll be subsequently influencing all other hormones that work upstream… you may feel better before your period but then you’ll start to experience spotting, irregular cycles etc. 

I will stand ten toes down that while herbs are an incredible support, they don’t even shine a light on how powerful your own energy, your life, your thoughts and beliefs are. I tell my clients that herbs can help them get from point a to point b faster because they will help the body heal, but at the end of the day you can heal without them as well.

The Simple Truth

So all in all, in my experience recently a lot of my clients are coming to me after being in this functional medicine/naturopathic space where the treatment plan is rooted in testings, supplements and herbs… and they’re coming to me because they are either barely getting better at all, or they are hitting a plateau. 

So I’m here to tell you that if there’s symptoms and dis ease showing up in your body, it is there to HELP you. So the solution is not to manage, manipulate or suppress the disease, but to restore coherence to function to your body so it can then carry out its own curative functions. Your body is designed to heal and you do not have to jump through hoops to make it do so, you just have to provide the environment. 

If you’re not seeing improvements or not the level that you’d like, you have to understand that there is nothing inherently wrong with you, you are just missing something fundamental. That’s why I said functional medicine labs, supplements & herbs keep you stuck, because they keep you searching for something outside of yourself when really what you need is to slow down, look at your life and resolve at the root. It’s what you do everyday and who you are that make up your health or your dis ease

The path to how you want to feel isn’t in another test or supplement protocol or parasite cleanse, it’s what you do everyday and who you are

The path looks more like:

Your routine

Your breathing

How you move through the world

Cellular hydration

Everyday habits

Eating schedule

Sleep hygiene

Electronic exposure

Relationship with light & nature

Connecting to your own body

Belief systems

Emotional regulation

+++

Abundantly healthy is your natural state. Reclaim your inherent vitality. If this resonates with you feel free to book a virtual Foundational Deep Dive for New Clients with me HERE, or download my ebook below. 

In abundant health,

❤️Chelsey