In my future practice, I want to combine naturopathic and functional medicine. I want to address the root causes of health concerns. I am very interested in interpreting lab results, and I have always looked forward to the day when I would start looking at labs in my classes at NUHS.

Well, I suppose that day has finally arrived! In my E&M GI course, we started breaking down, understanding, and interpreting complete blood count and comprehensive metabolic profile labs. I am starting to correlate various abdominal pathologies with these basic labs right now. It feels great to think critically, connecting the basic sciences with clinical reasoning. On my exam last week, there were several questions with lab results to interpret. It was during this exam that I realized that my focus at school has now shifted to clinical reasoning. I feel a true sense of excitement for critical thinking and synthesizing concepts.

I will have more classroom time dedicated to learning how to look at and interpret labs, but it is great to be starting it now. Lab results are definitely not the whole person, but it is a certain piece of the puzzle that I have personally been looking forward to learning about more.

As a side note, I want to follow up with my last post to confirm that Wisconsin is now officially the 26th  jurisdiction in the United States that is regulating naturopathic physicians!