Social media glorifies the message “test don’t guess” which could make you think that more testing automatically leads to better answers, while the lack of testing could just be a “guess”. However, when working with a qualified naturopath or herbalist, our treatment plans are never about guessing, they are about understanding you.

While pathology and functional testing certainly have their place, they’re just one piece of the puzzle. This may be why you have a batch of results that have come back “normal” but you feel anything but normal.

Our role is to find the root cause of your health concern so we can identify what is going on behind the scenes and these “normal” results. That’s why your initial consultation is often filled with lots of questions, even some that might seem unrelated to the reason you’ve come to see us. This is because every question helps us build a picture of your health. Often, the answer isn’t found in a single question or a single test result, but in the patterns that emerge from your story and experiences. By listening carefully, we can often identify the underlying drivers of your symptoms, allowing us to treat the person in front of us.

In the majority of cases, this thorough assessment provides us with all the information we need to understand how best to support you, meaning additional testing is unlikely to change our treatment plan.  However, if we think that testing could change the direction of treatment by answering specific questions, it is something we will explore. But it doesn’t have to be our first step.