You walk into the doctor’s office with crushing fatigue, brain fog, joint pain, anxiety, bloating, and a metabolism that’s been in witness protection since when— the 90s? You list off your symptoms, your doctor nods politely, taps a few things into the EMR, and sends you off with a lab order.
A few days later, the phone rings. Or more likely, you get a portal message that reads:
“Good news! Labs are all within normal limits! You are perfectly fine.”
That’s the moment. The moment where you realize the system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as it was designed—to catch disease, not dysfunction. And if you’re still in the in-between, guess what?
You’re just not sick enough yet.
You know your body—you live in that body. You sure as hell aren’t “well.” So if your labs are all normal, why do you feel like complete shit? I’ve got a few ideas.
My name is Dr. Kristen Lindgren, and welcome back to the podcast. We don’t have a ‘wellcare system’—we have a sick care system. We don’t practice proactive healthcare, we have a reactive one. If you’re interested in learning how feeling like garbage and having completely normal labs can coexist—even outside the laws of quantum physics—then let’s get into it 😊
Reason 1: The Sick Person Standard
I’ve talked about this before, but here’s the dirty little secret about lab reference ranges: they aren’t based on optimal health or the lab results of healthy people. They’re based on population averages. And those averages? Not exactly the gold standard.
Most reference ranges are determined by taking the middle 95% of the population that walks into a lab—which includes smokers, pre-diabetics, people with undiagnosed autoimmune disease, chronic inflammation, and let’s be honest, people who are just plain unwell. Labs are expensive. Most healthy people aren’t walking into the lab ‘just to check on things.’
Well, my patients do—we’ll get there.
So when your doctor says your TSH (a thyroid lab) is “normal” at 4.5, or your B12 is “fine” at 320, that doesn’t mean it’s optimal. It means you’re not worse than 95% of the people being tested—which is not the same thing as being healthy.
Functional medicine uses optimal ranges—ranges determined not by a population of sick people, but a population of healthy people. Our objective isn’t to keep people just off death’s door. It’s to prevent disease from happening in the first place.
And here’s a concept: what’s optimal for one person might be different than what’s optimal for another. That’s because everyone is different. You might even use the word ‘unique.’ That’s why functional medicine is often referred to as ‘personalized healthcare’—because we recognize that a testosterone level of 600 in one man, for example, may be great, but it may be half of what the guy working down the hall from him needs.
Got me? OK.
Reason 2: Tests That Don’t Exist (Yet)
Let’s talk about what conventional medicine can’t see—because it’s not looking for it.
Feeling like shit could mean you have pneumonia or COVID or cancer. Conventional medicine has pretty good tests for these things (well… even that’s debatable), but for the sake of this point ,let’s assume they do. But feeling like shit could also mean you have:
- Mold toxicity (CIRS)
- Chronic Lyme disease or co-infections
- Mitochondrial dysfunction
- Stealth pathogens (like EBV or HHV-6)
- Immune dysregulation
- Chronic inflammation
Try asking to be tested for these devastating health conditions and I guarantee you, you’ll either be told – ‘ahh, what? That’s not a real thing, or we tested you for everything, and everything is “normal.” The medical establishment doesn’t even believe in well-established conditions like chronic Lyme, reactivated Epstein-Barr virus, or ‘problems with your mitochondria.’ They have likely forgotten what a mitochondria even is. I digress…
The best testing for these conditions is cutting-edge, state-of-the-art. These are out-of-pocket expenses because mold toxicity isn’t part of routine labs. Quest doesn’t even have a lab test for mold. Or even understands the immune system destruction seen with chronic Lyme. The CDC-approved Lyme ELISA test misses up to half of true acute infections and about 100% of chronic ones. There is no conventional lab panel that tells you if your mitochondria are strained or just straight up shot.
Then there are the subtle dysfunctions: early adrenal burnout, early hormone decline, early autoimmunity, redox imbalance. These don’t trigger alarms on standard labs until they’re full-blown disasters.
If you’re waiting for conventional medicine to validate your symptoms, you’ll be waiting until your body is broken enough to earn a diagnosis.
Congratulations, you’re finally sick enough to be taken seriously.
But we have tests to detect these issues years—often decades—before a person is a steaming pile of dysfunction. So why don’t they check for those things in people who feel fine? Why don’t they check for them in people who feel terrible when regular labs are “normal”?
Reason 3: Aging Isn’t Natural—It’s Untreated
Let’s zoom way out. Up until 200 years ago, nobody lived this long. You were lucky if you made it to 40. “Aging” wasn’t even a thing back in cavemen times. And guess what starts to decline around the age of 40?
Your hormones. Your mitochondrial health. Your stress resilience.
Our biology hasn’t changed—but our lifespan has. The problem is that we’ve normalized breakdown as inevitable, instead of recognizing it as treatable.
Aging isn’t normal. Aging is a disease.
There’s ongoing debate about making this an actual ICD-10 diagnosis. In 2022, Dr. David Sinclair co-authored a commentary in The Lancet Healthy Longevity advocating for the inclusion of “advanced pathological aging” in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), emphasizing the need to address aging as a treatable condition.
I think you can guess how that landed.
Back to being 40—or in a lot of people, even earlier—hormone levels drop. Your sex drive? Gone. Welcome to menopause. Can’t recover from workouts? That’s just your new dad bod. Sleep is crap, fat accumulates around your midsection, hair gets thin, memory gets—what was I saying?—and your cortisol is through the roof? Must just be stress.
Aging is cellular dysfunction stacked over time. But that dysfunction is often reversible—if we test for and treat it. If we stop pretending that entropy is the natural order of things.
Did your doc ever offer to test your hormones once you hit 40?
That was rhetorical.
Just because you’re older doesn’t mean you have to decay. But try telling that to a system that thinks “low testosterone” is fine as long as it’s within the bottom 2.5%.
Ladies—yes, you need testosterone too.
Stop reading Reddit. Those people are mentally unhinged. Testosterone is the most abundant sex hormone in the female body. Period. You only grow a beard if you’re taking Liver King doses. Not throwing shade on those folks either – you do you.
Reason 4: You Are Energy, Not Just Chemistry
Here’s what labs can’t tell you: your vibrational state. Your coherence. Your bioelectric health. Sure, we can get insight with other kinds of testing like heart rate variability, muscle testing, and other tools I’m not allowed to talk about on this channel—but they’re not blood tests.
Every cell in your body is a tiny capacitor. Every organ, a tuning fork. If your body is energetically incoherent, your chemistry won’t matter.
Redox balance (that’s industry-speak for reducing oxidative damage), mitochondrial coupling, quantum coherence—none of this shows up on your CBC. But it matters. Because if your mitochondria can’t signal properly, if your field is fragmented, your body can’t self-regulate.
See my last two posts on quantum biology and healing—I’ll link to those here. Episode 8 and Episode 7.
You are not just a bag of hormones and nutrients. You are a frequency-based, resonant system that responds to light, sound, intention, environment, and energy.
But the healthcare system doesn’t have a way to measure that.
But do they really want to know?
Tinfoil hat. I made this specifically for you people.
Reason 5: Lived Experience > Lab Numbers
Here’s a wild idea: what if we believed patients?
What if we trusted the person living in the body over the lab slip printed in the nurse’s station?
Because your body whispers before it screams. You know when something isn’t right—typically light-years before we can catch it on a lab. And if you’re bloated, brain-fogged, and breaking down, it doesn’t matter if your CRP is 1.2 and your thyroid panel is “in range.” Something is off.
Symptoms are information. Fatigue is information. Pain is information.
Your lived experience is the most sensitive diagnostic tool available. But it’s the one the conventional system is trained to ignore.
Functional medicine doesn’t dismiss symptoms just because the labs are clean. We dig and dig and dig until we figure it out. It’s the most gratifying detective work on the planet—even more than true crime, or you all know I would be doing that instead.
We treat the person, not the paperwork.
Closing Thoughts On Sickness Despite Healthy Labs
If you’re still sick even though your labs are perfect, I can guarantee it’s not in your head.
It is not a Prozac deficiency.
It’s in your mitochondria. Your hormones. Your immune system. Your environment. Your energy field.
You are not crazy.
You are simply being failed by a system that was never designed to find what’s really wrong.
“Normal” doesn’t mean optimal.”
“Within range” doesn’t mean functional.”
And just because the system can’t measure it doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
What conventional medicine has to offer is carefully curated. I say this all the time, but I’ll say it again:
There is no money in wellness.
I’m not talking about the individual doctors and nurses—these are generally good people who want to help. But the system profits from managing disease—not preventing it. How much money is lost if your cancer is prevented? If you never get osteoporosis because you tested your hormones and replaced them? If you never needed anxiety medication because you addressed your generational trauma or a chronic infection inflaming your brain?
A lot. A lot of money is lost.
And Big Medicine is big business.
So here’s your takeaway:
If you’re still sick with “perfect” labs—maybe the labs are the problem.
Maybe the system is the problem.
And maybe the answer isn’t in the numbers—it’s in you.
Thanks so much for tuning in, everyone. I’m Dr. Kristen Lindgren, and if you found this episode useful or entertaining, please like the channel, leave a comment, and share this with a friend. I know I’m always begging for compliments, but those things really help the channel out.
If there’s something you’d like to hear more about, drop it in a comment below or send an email to our clinic—I’ll include it in the show notes. And lastly, if you know something is wrong with your health even though your labs are all normal—or if you just want to check on things to make sure everything’s running smoothly—please visit our website or call our office. We’d love to hear from you.
Until next time, stay curious, question everything, and remember: there are people like me who help people like you take control of your health.
I’ll see you for the next one—bye for now.
