Coronavirus testing is providing a fundamental lesson for all of us about how medical lab testing works – there are no tests that are 100 percent accurate. Figuring out false positives (indicating a person has a condition when they don’t) and false negatives (indicating a person doesn’t have a condition when they do) for COVID testing is an ongoing, in-the-field, work-in-progress. This means that even if your test comes back negative, yet you’re displaying the signs and symptoms of COVID-19, you may still be asked to act like you have it. New reports of individuals in China who were previously positive, then negative, then test positive again, may be due to the inherent level of test inaccuracy. We will, of course, be watching closely to determine whether reinfection is a possibility. We don’t yet know.
Kara Fitzgerald, ND, received her doctor of naturopathic medicine degree from the National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon. She completed the first Counsel on Naturopathic Medicine-accredited post-doctorate position in nutritional biochemistry and laboratory science at Metametrix Clinical Laboratory under the direction of Richard Lord, PhD. Her residency was completed at Progressive Medical Center, a large, integrative medical practice in Atlanta, Georgia.
Dr. Fitzgerald is the lead author and editor of Case Studies in Integrative and Functional Medicine and is a contributing author to Laboratory Evaluations for Integrative and Functional Medicine and the Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM)’s Textbook for Functional Medicine. With the Helfgott Research Institute, Dr. Fitzgerald is actively engaged in clinical research on the DNA methylome using a diet and lifestyle intervention developed in her practice. The first publication from the study focuses on reversal of biological aging and was published 04-12-2021 in the journal Aging. She has published a consumer book titled Younger You as well as a companion cookbook, Better Broths and Healing Tonics and has an application-based Younger You Program, based on the study.
Dr. Fitzgerald is on the faculty at IFM, is an IFM Certified Practitioner and lectures globally on functional medicine. She runs a Functional Nutrition Residency program, and maintains a podcast series, New Frontiers in Functional Medicine and an active blog on her website, www.drkarafitzgerald.com. Her clinical practice is in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.
Additional publications
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