Expert insights from Elizabeth Gaines,How one conservationist’s frustration with “perfectly healthy” people dropping dead led to a breakthrough methodology that’s transformed over 5,000 health practices worldwideDirector of Education at Functional Diagnostic Nutrition (FDN)
The Problem Every Health Practitioner Faces (But Few Will Admit)
Functional lab testing bridges the gap between feeling “okay” and achieving optimal health. Unlike conventional medicine tPicture this: A client sits across from you describing their symptoms. Chronic fatigue, can’t lose weight, brain fog, constipation, hormone imbalances. It sounds familiar—you’ve heard these complaints dozens of times before.
So you make your best educated guess. “This sounds like a possible low thyroid.” You recommend diet, exercise and some supplements, maybe even run a thyroid test. They try your protocol for a few weeks, see minimal improvement, and eventually the client stops following through.
Sound familiar?
If you’re a health coach or functional practitioner, you’ve likely experienced this frustrating cycle. You genuinely want to help people, but you’re operating on educated guesswork rather than concrete data. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: most health practitioners are still guessing what’s wrong with their clients – even if they already use some lab work.
Even in functional medicine circles, practitioners often listen to symptoms and then guess which specific test to run. “Sounds like thyroid,” they think, so they order a thyroid panel. When those results come back “normal,” they guess again…maybe it’s testosterone, or gut health, or something else. When there is a low thyroid level, most only treat the paper saying, “Let’s get these lab results back in range, ” as if that’s the secret to restoring health.
This approach isn’t just ineffective. It’s what keeps practitioners and their clients stuck in the endless cycle of trial and error that frustrates both of them. There must be a better way.
The “Perfectly Healthy” Wake-Up Call That Started Everything
Reed was making good money using his environmental law background as the senior vice president of a company that was supposedly cleaning up the planet. He was focused on saving the “air, birds, water, trees, and bees.” But two things were bothering him: the corporate focus on profit over purpose, and an even deeper concern.
“When you see enough dead fish and birds, you start wondering about people,” Reed explains. He thought, “What about us? What about humans, including me! What’s this environment doing to us?”
The wake-up call came when a good friend’s father who always loved Reed (someone everyone said was “perfectly healthy”) suddenly dropped dead.
“I know he wasn’t perfectly healthy if he suddenly dropped dead,” Reed supposed. “I really got concerned with people instead of the flora and fauna of the world.”
This moment of clarity led Reed to leave his lucrative career and join a wellness center in 1999, despite having zero medical background. And despite having to build his first business with what he laughingly calls “high tech” for the time: “a pager and a fax machine.”
“Just thank God,” Reed reflects on that career change. “Thank God at that time. I thank God every day, by the way, for everything.”
What happened next would revolutionize how thousands of practitioners approach client care. Not overnight, but eventually things became chrystal clear.
The Discovery That Changed Everything: Why “Test, Don’t Guess” Actually Works
Working at the wellness center, Reed interviewed client after client who had already seen “6, 8, 10 or more different practitioners and weren’t well yet.” As a consumer advocate, he thought these people must be getting ripped off.
“I decided I was gonna be the last person they needed to see. I didn’t know how, but I knew I could figure something out.”
What Reed figured out over the next ten years (running thousands of lab tests on thousands of people) would become the foundation of Functional Diagnostic Nutrition(r) (FDN).
The problem isn’t just about running more tests. As Reed discovered, “The idea of guessing what’s wrong with a person, running that lab and then treating the paper is obnoxious, if not harmful.” Yet, today it’s still a big part of the medical standard of care.
While other practitioners were guessing which single test to run based on symptoms, Reed discovered something remarkable: distinct patterns were showing up in every person across six key areas.
He called them the H-I-D-D-E-N stressors and dysfunctions:
Hormones
Immune function
Digestion
Detoxification
Energy production
Nervous system balance
“It became very reliable that if you could correct these areas, most of your problems would go away. Forget your diagnosis.”
The Fatal Flaw in Most Functional Approaches
Here’s where most functional practitioners (even well-intentioned ones) need steering. They might run comprehensive testing, but they’re still operating within a “diagnosis and treatment” paradigm.
They get really good at running a GI-MAP and become “gut specialists.” Or they master hormone testing and become “hormone specialists.” But this specialization actually limits their effectiveness.
“Even though functional medicine is looking for causal factors upstream, they’re guessing which test to run or, basically, going on a fishing trip using broad range functional blood work to see what they can catch.” Reed explains. “That’s just the nature of medicine—the standard of care requires them to diagnose and treat.”
The problem? Health doesn’t occur in isolation.
You could have a chronic stressor that is causing a hormone imbalance that affects your immune system, which impacts digestion (since most of your immune system is in your digestive tract), leading to hyperpermeability and then liver toxicity issues. Now you have detoxification problems and a downward spiral towards auto-immunity and other problems occur from there.
“If you aren’t looking at how multiple causal factors and dysfunctions are affecting each other, you’re not working as comprehensively as you can and perhaps should, if you really wanna help people permanently recover and thrive.”
This is why someone might see improvements in energy and lose a few pounds working with a “hormone specialist,” but still struggle with other symptoms. “Oh, well, you need to go see a different specialist for that,” becomes the all too common and frustrating response.
The D.R.E.S.S. Solution: Beyond Supplements and Quick Fixes
Using multiple labs including blood, saliva, urine and stool, Reed learned to identify multiple causal factors and “healing opportunities” for each individual client. Perhaps more importantly, Reed observed the effect the causal factors were having on each other. (Something you don’t hear much about in any other system) That’s when he coined the phrase “Metabolic Chaos(R)” – a state that exists when a person is suffering from multiple causal factors that often cannot be singly measured. Once this was established, having identified multiple healing opportunities, Reed faced the next challenge: “What can we get the client to do about it?”
Since he couldn’t write prescriptions and his clients didn’t want another diagnosis-and-prescription approach anyway, Reed developed what would become the D.R.E.S.S. for Health Success Protocol ®:
- Diet (personalized inherited requirements based on lab findings)
- Rest (proper sleep and both physical and mental/emotional recovery)
- Exercise (appropriate for the individual’s age, conditioning, etc.)
- Stress Reduction (addressing all known and discoverable forms of distress)
- Supplementation (muti-phased approach to healing and nutritional support)
“I started sending people home with things to do. It’s called epigenetics. You lived yourself into these problems you’re having. Let’s see what it takes to live yourself OUT of them”
This approach recognizes that “about 80% of all doctor visits are stress-related.” But we’re not about replacing drugs with supplements—Reed is clear about that limitation: “A lot of people in alternative medicine just sell supplements. They replace drugs with supplements. I think natural products are generally safer, but not as effective sometimes. So you have to get the combination right.”
The goal is creating comprehensive lifestyle medicine that addresses “every cell, tissue, organ and system – simultaneously.”
The results? “People just got better. It didn’t matter what a person’s condition was.”
Why This Approach Works When Others Fail
The FDN methodology succeeds where other approaches struggle because it’s built on three revolutionary principles:
1. Comprehensive Assessment, Not Educated Guessing
Instead of listening to symptoms and guessing which test to run, FDN practitioners assess multiple major body systems simultaneously. This reveals a “constellation of healing opportunities” and how different causal factors may be interacting with each other.
2. Upstream Focus, Not Symptom Management
“Many sources indicate that about 50% of all diseases and 80% of all doctor visits are stress-related,” Reed notes. FDN looks for the root stressors and dysfunctions that create Metabolic Chaos(R) and downstream symptoms, rather than chasing symptoms around importantly, treating paper.
3. Epigenetic Approach, Not Quick Fixes
“Every cell knows what its job is. You don’t have to teach your cells what their job is.”
FDN relies heavily upon the innate intelligence in every cell and the body’s unique ability to heal itself over time. FDN isn’t about finding that one supplement or treatment that fixes everything. It’s about creating an environment that allows the body’s innate intelligence to heal itself.
The Lab Access Game-Changer for Health Coaches
The Functional Diagnostic Nutrition (FDN) methodology shifts how we approach health challenges. Instead of treating One of the biggest limitations health coaches face is lab access. You can’t order comprehensive functional testing without a medical license, right?
Not so fast.
FDN has solved this problem through partnerships that allow practitioners to access over 70 different functional lab tests, without medical licenses. This isn’t about skirting regulations; it’s about working within a framework that gives health coaches the diagnostic tools they need to excel.
The validation for this approach came from an unexpected source. Early in Reed’s journey, a laboratory owner called him up: “Who the hell are you?” the owner asked. “You run more labs than any five doctors. In fact, our top five customers don’t do as many labs as you do. So whatever you’re doing, you should be teaching other doctors and practitioners what you are doing.”
“Health coaches love the fact that they can run the labs we teach through our program,” Reed explains. “It’s all under our guidance and supervision. We work very closely with the labs.”
This changes everything for health coaches who have been stuck making recommendations based on intake forms and guesswork.
Real-World Applications: What This Looks Like in Practice
For the Non Licensed Practitioner: Instead of recommending generic “diet and exercise” advice, you’re now making specific recommendations based on objective lab data. Your clients see dramatic improvements because you’re addressing their actual imbalances, not just surface symptoms.
For the Licensed Practitioner: You can finally step outside the constraints of standard-of-care algorithms and diagnosis-treatment models. You’re free to look at the whole person and address root causes comprehensively.
For the Career Changer: You don’t need decades of medical training to make a real difference. Reed proves that with the right methodology and mindset, I can “teach someone in about ten months or less, what took me ten years to learn.” As he notes, “I had a lot to learn, but I had nothing to unlearn,” which turned out to be a major advantage.
But Reed is realistic about the commitment required: “Don’t come thinking this is a weekend course, it’s very robust training. I’ll teach you, step-by-step, what took me ten years to learn. It’s so practical, with no fluff, many Masters and PhDs have told me they wish they had just taken the FDN Course instead.”
When FDN Works Best (And When It Doesn’t)
FDN excels with:
- Most chronic stress-related, downward-spiralling conditions
- Unresolved general malaise and chronic fatigue
- Weight management and body composition issues
- Childhood health problems (kids respond quickly to epigenetic changes)
- Protracted conditions where there’s “time for the body to heal”
But Reed is crystal clear about limitations: “The difference between modern medicine and FDN – when the downward spiral is really contracted, it’s time to go see a doctor, the observations we make are hard to capitalize on. When the downward spiral is protracted… there is time for the body to heal.”
FDN is NOT appropriate for:
- Emergency/heroic care situations
- Acute medical crises
- Situations requiring immediate medical intervention
“If you’re dying, go see a doctor,” Reed says plainly. “If you come off a plane from West Africa with a 105-degree fever and bleeding from your eyeballs, you’re not going to call your nutritionist. If you’ve been the victim of a drive-by shooting, you’re not gonna call your FDN.”
Reed knows this personally. At 72, after 20 years of kickboxing, he has a torn labrum in his right hip. “That’s the leg I kicked with the most—my sidekick was devastating if you were on the other end of it. Now I can’t even throw a kick. Yeah, I might need surgery. Thank God we have the best doctors on the planet for stuff like that.”
But once someone is stable? That’s where FDN shines.
“As long as they’re still breathing and there’s time, the observations we make can be capitalized on through diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction, and supplementation.” This creates what Reed calls “remarkable and dependable dovetailing” between medical care and FDN’s approach.
The Next Evolution of Your Practice
If you’re tired of the trial-and-error approach that leaves both you and your clients frustrated, it’s time to explore a methodology that puts data-driven certainty at the center of your practice.
The FDN approach doesn’t just give you access to functional lab testing. It gives you a complete framework for:
- Identifying the multiple causal factors that are always in play.
- A deep understanding of how to correlate lab reports with that individual
- Creating comprehensive, personalized protocols that work
- Building a referral-based practice through consistent results
- Establishing yourself as the practitioner clients trust most
Ready to become the last practitioner your clients need to see?
[Discover how FDN can transform your practice with our free Clinical Discovery Workshop →]
[Schedule a program consultation to learn about FDN certification →]
