Seminar 4 : Lab Testing in Integrative Medicine - presenting 28 march 2009

The goal of this seminar is to organize and explain various tests that are available so as to make their use more applicable to medical education and clinical practice.     There is a new standard of care emerging in medicine, and recent science in molecular medicine has challenged the fatalistic approach to the mere management of disease with the pharmaco-therapeutic approach.     The predisposition model recognizes that we all inherit genetic vulnerability, but it incorporates unfolding evidence that environmental and nutritional factors interact with our genome to produce a unique phenotype and the eventual clinical outcome.     In order to identify the causative determinants that must be addressed in clinical situations, an objective mechanism is required to explore those nutritional and toxicological factors that are contributing on a molecular basis to health outcomes.    Accordingly, laboratory testing to evaluate biochemical, toxicological and nutritional status in individual patients is an absolute prerequisite in modern health care to adequately investigate and manage health problems, particularly in patients with complex problems.