Comprehensive Blood Panel in Greenville, SC
Comprehensive Blood Panel at IHP Greenville. Dr. Hendry, DAOM — functional medicine, root-cause diagnostics, personalized care. Call (864) 365-6156.
"Dr. Hendry has been working with me to heal my GI tract. 100% improvement in how I feel, taking 1/4 of my blood pressure meds, and am no longer taking cholesterol meds."
— Karen Hill · January 2025 · Google Review
The standard annual physical orders roughly 15 biomarkers and is designed primarily for disease detection. My comprehensive panel runs 60 or more markers and is designed for function optimization — identifying the drivers of symptoms before they produce detectable disease. Selenium deficiency drives Hashimoto's progression but doesn't appear on a standard panel. An omega-3 index below 4% is a stronger cardiovascular risk factor than LDL in some populations but is never ordered in a routine lipid panel. RBC magnesium reflects intracellular magnesium sufficiency, where serum magnesium is maintained at the expense of cellular depletion until the last 1% of reserves are gone. These are the findings that explain why patients feel unwell with normal annual labs.
How Comprehensive Blood Panel Works
Dr. Hendry orders a comprehensive panel tailored to your presentation. A baseline panel typically includes: CBC with differential, comprehensive metabolic panel, full lipid panel, full thyroid panel, iron studies, ferritin, vitamin D (25-OH), B12, folate, magnesium (RBC), zinc, CRP-hs, homocysteine, HbA1c, fasting insulin, and uric acid. Additional markers (cortisol, sex hormones, inflammatory cytokines) are added based on clinical findings.
Conditions Treated with Comprehensive Blood Panel
60+ Biomarker Comprehensive Panel vs. Annual Physical Blood Work
During the annual physical, a 56-year-old woman is told her bloodwork is unremarkable. Her TSH is 2.6 mIU/L, cholesterol is borderline high, and her basic metabolic panel is within range. She reports fatigue, hair thinning, difficulty maintaining weight, and joint stiffness but is advised these are consistent with her age. Our expanded panel adds free T3, free T4, reverse T3, TPO antibodies, thyroglobulin antibodies, 25-OH vitamin D, homocysteine, hs-CRP, fasting insulin, HOMA-IR, RBC magnesium, selenium, ferritin, omega-3 index, DHEA-S, and a full sex hormone panel. The results reveal subclinical hypothyroidism with elevated TPO antibodies indicating Hashimoto's thyroiditis, vitamin D at 19 ng/mL, selenium at the lower limit of the reference range, fasting insulin of 18 mIU/L, and an omega-3 index of 3.2%, well below the cardioprotective threshold of 8%. Each of these findings has a specific, evidence-based intervention. The standard panel could not have identified any of them, not because the pathology was absent, but because the appropriate questions were not asked.
Research & Evidence
The standard annual physical blood panel in the United States typically includes a CBC, basic metabolic panel, TSH, and lipid panel, a combination that covers fewer than 15 biomarkers and is designed primarily for disease detection rather than function optimization. Beidelschies et al. (JAMA Netw Open. 2019) demonstrated that patients receiving functional medicine-model care, which includes comprehensive biomarker assessment and individualized intervention, reported significantly greater improvements in health-related quality of life at six months compared to those receiving conventional primary care, with the greatest gains in vitality and physical function domains. Bland (The Disease Delusion. 2014) documented that the most clinically informative biomarkers for identifying early metabolic dysfunction, including fasting insulin, homocysteine, high-sensitivity CRP, 25-OH vitamin D, omega-3 index, and RBC magnesium, are absent from standard annual panels despite robust outcome data supporting their clinical utility. Gartner et al. (J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2002) demonstrated that selenium deficiency, identifiable only through specific micronutrient testing, drives thyroid peroxidase antibody production in autoimmune thyroiditis, representing a correctable biochemical driver invisible to a standard TSH. Our expanded panel of 60 or more biomarkers is organized by physiological system and reviewed comprehensively rather than in isolation, revealing the interconnected patterns that single-marker testing routinely misses.
Your First Appointment
Fast for 10–12 hours before blood draw. Bring water and a small snack for after. Avoid intense exercise the morning before drawing. Current medications (even supplements) should be documented.
Why Dr. Hendry for Comprehensive Blood Panel
Dr. Hendry's scientific background enables him to select the most clinically informative markers for each patient's presentation — not a one-size-fits-all panel — and to interpret results with a scientist's analytical rigor.