51 / How To Take Ownership Of Your Health Using 'Your Lab Work' w/ Dr. Alan Hopkins

Thyroid Strong

Lab work is often very confusing to read and understand. It’s tough to know if your doctor is even ordering the right lab work and if that work is telling you the complete story of your health. Wouldn’t it be great if you could take more direct ownership of getting the health information that you need by ordering and completing these tests yourself?

Dr. Alan Hopkins is an emergency room doctor in Austin, Texas. With a keen interest in how medicine can help fight the effects of aging, he obtained a certificate as part of a fellowship with A4M in anti-aging medicine. Dr. Hopkins has taken his expertise on aging to some major companies and TV studios as a consultant. Throughout this process, he realized the importance of giving consumers better access to the lab tests that they need. That’s how Your Lab Work began.

Dr. Hopkins and I dive into the importance of receiving the right medical tests and why this sometimes does not happen in today’s medical world. We also talk about changes that occur in our bodies when we train and lose weight and the ramifications of these. Dr. Hopkins goes on to explain a number of important tests everyone should consider getting and how to best make sense of the results.

Have you ever received surprising results from the lab? Did this spur you to take action to better care for your health? Tell me about it in the comments on the episode page!

In this episode

• The benefits of being able to choose and order your own lab work
• What happens in your body when you rapidly lose weight
• Common problems for people who overtrain and how to best mitigate these
• The crucial importance of getting an advanced cholesterol test
• Best practices for increasing low vitamin D levels
• How to make sense of the results of thyroid tests and what to do to reverse a thyroid disease
• How labs can help us detect environmental pollutants in our bodies

Quotes

“Between nutrition and sleep, most of your issues can be solved for athletes.” [11:06]

“It’s not just about having the best performance. It’s actually about long-term prevention of strain on the heart.” [14:32]

“We like to think of it as the great chameleon. If you’re having symptoms and something doesn’t seem right, you really need to do a complete evaluation of the thyroid, including thyroid antibodies.” [26:44]

“Industry is polluting the environment and that can sometimes leach into the soil and our water supply. It gets into our bodies and it goes undetected because we don’t check for it in medicine.” [33:15]

“I encourage all young people to really know their bodies and their biomarkers because the truth is young is not so young anymore.” [44:19]

Links

Find Dr. Alan Hopkins at Your Lab Work

Join the Lab IQ Facebook group

The DUTCH test

Dr. Alan Christianson

Great Plains Laboratory

Quest Diagnostics

Check out the full show notes for this episode here

Urban Wellness Clinic

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