How can we assess the quality of your immune system?
In our practice, one of the ways we can actually assess the quality of the immune system is through a test that we do within our clinic called Darkfield Microscopy.
Darkfield Microscopy involves a prick of the fingertip and we look at the live blood cells underneath the microscope and we can get an idea of what the body’s internal environment looks like. Because from that one drop of blood, that’s the same blood that circulates throughout the entire body, so we get lots of information from just that one drop of blood. And within that drop of blood, what we are able to see is a person’s white blood cells. By looking at a person’s white blood cells we can get an idea of how well their immune system is functioning.
One of the things we look at is the number of white blood cells a person has. When you do conventional blood work with your GP, they will assess your white blood cells and give you a quantitative analysis of the white blood cells. They’ll tell you how many white blood cells you have and how many of each type of white blood cells you have. This does give you a quantitative idea of where your white blood cells are at. This is great information, because we know if we have a low amount of white blood cells that the immune system is deficient. So we able to see this with darkfield microscopy as well as with conventional blood work.
The other component of the blood that we can see with the darkfield microscopy is the size of the white blood cells. Those white blood cells should look like big white puffy clouds. They should be about 3 times the size of a normal, healthy red blood cell. If these white blood cells are on the smaller side, this would tell us that there are some deficiencies of the immune system.
The other component we are looking at is the activity within those white blood cells. What we should see is that those white blood cells, when we look closely at them we should see some activity going on within the cells and we can see that activity with darkfield microscopy. When we see lots of activity within those white blood cells, it tells us that their immune system is working well.
This is what we would look at when we are doing darkfield microscopy and this would give us great insight into the how well the immune system is functioning.
If we see a good amount of white blood cells, that the white blood cells are a good size and that there is good activity within those white blood cells, then we know that this person has a strong immune system.
If we see that there is a low amount of white blood cells, we see the smaller size of white blood cells and we see a lack of activity of the white blood cells, that would tell us that there is deficiencies of the immune system and we would need to be working on certain aspects of the immune system, such as helping the body to make white blood cells, help the body to make larger white blood cells or we need to turn on the activity within the white blood cells. This gives us insight into how we are going to get the immune system is function better.
Darkfield microscopy gives us insight into how well the immune system is functioning.
