READING YOUR BLOOD TEST RESULTS
Blood Sugar
Take glucose (blood sugar), for example. The range given
by our lab was usually 65 to 115 mg/dL. If your value was 95,
using this range, it is exceptionally good. To understand the
meaning of a result using a different range, you should know
how the range was decided.
One of the very large testing labs analyses the blood sugar
results for, say, the last 10,000 patients it has tested. It is as-
sumed that they represent the healthy population (which is, of
course, not true, since illness brought them to the lab for testing
to begin with). The average blood sugar level is found. Then
ninety-five percent of all these patients’ results are clustered
around this average to make a “normal curve”. Five percent are
thrown away as representing abnormal levels. The lowest and
highest levels for these 95% are used to give the range.^111
This is far from a true standard of good health. It assumes
that 95% of the population is healthy. If, in reality, only 80% are
healthy, very many people are not being attended and conse-
quently not being alerted to the need for improvement because
they are assigned to the “normal” group. Preventive health care
is not being served.
A concept of “sick” or “not sick” depending on whether you
fit into the values seen for 95% of the patient population is
misleading. It is like defining overweight as over 500 pounds
(200 kg)! A wrong concept such as this does a disservice to so-
ciety. Don’t let a physician’s reassurance that “everything is
normal” fool you into thinking you are normal (meaning
healthy). Your standard should be higher than “statistically
normal,” your standard should be “healthy.”
In this book, the true, healthy values will be given as I per-
ceive them , together with their correct meaning, so you can take
steps to help any organ that is weak. I determined them by ob-
serving at least two thousand patients closely, most with a series
of tests that spanned a period from the time they arrived with
(^111) Berkow, R., Ed., The Merck Manual 16 th ed., Merck Research Lab., 1992, p. 2573.