Toolkit Tuesday: A Simple Tool to Help You Get the Most Out of Your Lab Tests
February 21, 2023
Table of Contents
Lab tests are essential tools in determining the correct treatment path for our children. They can be expensive and invasive so we want to make sure when we do them that we are getting every little bit of value out of each one we do. In this Toolkit Tuesday podcast episode, we’ll be discussing the Lab Test Tracker, a simple tool that can help you save time, money and effort and maximize the usefulness of the lab tests you perform.
The Lab Test Tracker is one of the many tools found in the My Child Will Thrive Toolkit, which you can find for free inside the My Child Will Thrive Toolkit here.
The Toolkit includes:
- Researched and field-tested guides, tracking tools, checklists and cheat sheets allow you to get to the root of what is causing your child’s challenges. so that you don’t waste time creating them yourself.
- Videos to walk you through some of the more challenging topics you will need to learn to help identify what your child needs.
- Using The My Child Will Thrive Toolkit gives you a head start so you can focus on what is most important – your child!
Lab tests can provide measurable and unique insights into your child’s health and are a very valuable tool when making decisions about what the next best steps are for your child’s treatment and therapy plan.
Keeping track of every test that is done for your child in one place helps you save repeating labs unnecessarily and it serves as both a tool to share with a new practitioner so they can tell you which labs they are interested in seeing and it can also keep track of when labs need to be repeated and more.
Watch, listen or read this week’s episode of the podcast to learn more about this simple but effective tool.
I recommend watching the video on this page below or on our YouTube Channel to see the tool as I walk you through it. I hope you enjoy this episode!
[su_box title=”Things You Will Learn” box_color=”#84C141″ class=”nutshell_box”]
- What the free My Child Will Thrive Toolkit is.
- What the RAIRE Method™ is and how tools like the Lab Test Tracker help you make the best decisions for your child with confidence and clarity.
- How you can help practitioners you work with by using the Lab Test Tracker.
- How this tool can save you from repeating lab work unnecessarily.
- How to access the My Child Will Thrive Toolkit for you and your child.
- And much more…[/su_box]
Show Notes for this Podcast
- What the My Child Will Thrive Toolkit is (1:28)
- What the RAIRE Method™ is and how the Lab Test Tracker fits into the RAIRE method™ (1:55)
- How the Lab Test Tracker saves you time, and money and avoids unnecessary lab work (3:59)
- How to use of the Lab Test Tracker helps when working with multiple practitioners to coordinate care better and minimize expenses (6:59)
Resources and Links
Sign up for the free My Child Will Thrive Toolkit
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00:01 Tara Hunkin:
This is the My Child Will Thrive podcast and I'm your host, Tara Hunkin, Certified Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner and mother. I am here to share with you the latest research expert advice, parent perspectives, resources, and tools to help you on your path to optimizing the health and development for your child with ADHD, autism, sensory processing disorder, learning disabilities,
or other neurodevelopmental disorders. My own experiences with my daughter combined with as much training as I can get my hands on, research I can dig into and conferences I can attend have helped me to develop systems and tools for parents like you who feel overwhelmed trying to help their children. So sit back as I share another great topic to help you on your journey.
A quick disclaimer, please keep in mind that the information provided is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to diagnose or treat your child and is not a substitute for working with a qualified practitioner. This episode of the My Child Will Thrive podcast is brought to you by the Autism, ADHD, and Sensory Processing Disorder Summit. You can sign up for free to watch 10 days of expert interviews and masterclasses at mychildwillthrive.com/summit. Now on with the show.
01:24 Tara Hunkin:
Hello and welcome back to Toolkit Tuesday. What is Toolkit Tuesday? It's the day we share one of our tools or tools we love here at My Child Will Thrive. Today I'm gonna be sharing with you one of the tools that works with the RAIRE Method that is in the free toolkit, which you can find at mychildwillthrive.com/toolkit. But before we get to the tool,
I just wanna give you a little refresher on what the RAIRE method is and why I created it. So the RAIRE Method came out of the fact I was always falling down research rabbit holes. I'd often have at least 20 tabs or more open on my browser at a time. One article or blog post led to a new tab that led to another. I think you get the picture and I couldn't really blame Chrome for crashing on me all the time.
The endless cycle of new information fueled new research and sometimes impulse purchases of new tools or supplements or new tests I thought my child needed. Some of the new avenues would quickly get dropped, and others produced results, but there really wasn't a plan of attack for most of them. Once I understood the fundamentals of what was underlying the causes of my child's struggles, I knew I needed a system,
a system to plan, track and monitor what I was doing and why it was or wasn't working. Over time, I created tools and systems into what I now call the RAIRE method to manage my child's care. And then I used it with others as well. The RAIRE method is not rocket science, but it did help me gain confidence and clarity in my decisions of the next steps I should take and a way to evaluate what was working and what wasn't with my child.
03:33 Tara Hunkin:
So let's just take a really quick look at the RAIRE method itself. I'll just explain to you if you're watching this on YouTube or on a website, you can see a graphic of what the RAIRE method is and basically, it's an infinite loop. Now sometimes that overwhelms people in and of itself because they think. Where do we end? Well, it's just that we go through a cycle, an infinite cycle with our children in terms of how we work with them.
03:59 Tara Hunkin:
So the R in the RAIRE method, so RAIRE is an acronym R A I R E and each letter is one step in the process in that infinite loop. Step one is recording and the tool we're gonna be talking about today is actually part of that step one process of recording and we'll get to that in a minute.
04:19 Tara Hunkin:
Step two is analyzing. Step three, the I is for interpret. Now interpret the data that we recorded in step one and then we will take that interpretation to revise our plan that we're working on with our child. If this is the first time that you are creating a plan for your child, then you'd be obviously just starting to create that first plan from that interpretation of the data.
And then the E in RAIRE at the end is execute. So once we revise the plan, we then in step five execute that plan and then we loop back around to, as we're executing the R step one record, we're gonna keep recording that data so we have the best information possible to help make those decisions as we go through that loop again.
05:10 Tara Hunkin:
Very simple; five-step process. Within each of the steps as I mentioned before, we have tools that have been developed to help you through that step. So we have a number of tools in the record step, a lot of trackers, we've talked about those before on Toolkit Tuesday. And then we have tools and guides within and we use the tools in the record for analyzing and interpreting as well and a lot of guides for the interpretation step. Step four, revising. We have tools in there that you can use to then help you revise that plan and lay it out so that you're ready to execute again and guides to help with the execution of the plan.
05:49 Tara Hunkin:
So today we're gonna talk about, as I said, a simple tool, a very simple tool that's in step one of the RAIRE method, which is, is recording the vital data that we use in making decision
00:01 Tara Hunkin:
This is the My Child Will Thrive podcast and I'm your host, Tara Hunkin, Certified Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner and mother. I am here to share with you the latest research expert advice, parent perspectives, resources, and tools to help you on your path to optimizing the health and development for your child with ADHD, autism, sensory processing disorder, learning disabilities,
or other neurodevelopmental disorders. My own experiences with my daughter combined with as much training as I can get my hands on, research I can dig into and conferences I can attend have helped me to develop systems and tools for parents like you who feel overwhelmed trying to help their children. So sit back as I share another great topic to help you on your journey.
A quick disclaimer, please keep in mind that the information provided is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to diagnose or treat your child and is not a substitute for working with a qualified practitioner. This episode of the My Child Will Thrive podcast is brought to you by the Autism, ADHD, and Sensory Processing Disorder Summit. You can sign up for free to watch 10 days of expert interviews and masterclasses at mychildwillthrive.com/summit. Now on with the show.
01:24 Tara Hunkin:
Hello and welcome back to Toolkit Tuesday. What is Toolkit Tuesday? It's the day we share one of our tools or tools we love here at My Child Will Thrive. Today I'm gonna be sharing with you one of the tools that works with the RAIRE Method that is in the free toolkit, which you can find at mychildwillthrive.com/toolkit. But before we get to the tool,
I just wanna give you a little refresher on what the RAIRE method is and why I created it. So the RAIRE Method came out of the fact I was always falling down research rabbit holes. I'd often have at least 20 tabs or more open on my browser at a time. One article or blog post led to a new tab that led to another. I think you get the picture and I couldn't really blame Chrome for crashing on me all the time.
The endless cycle of new information fueled new research and sometimes impulse purchases of new tools or supplements or new tests I thought my child needed. Some of the new avenues would quickly get dropped, and others produced results, but there really wasn't a plan of attack for most of them. Once I understood the fundamentals of what was underlying the causes of my child's struggles, I knew I needed a system,
a system to plan, track and monitor what I was doing and why it was or wasn't working. Over time, I created tools and systems into what I now call the RAIRE method to manage my child's care. And then I used it with others as well. The RAIRE method is not rocket science, but it did help me gain confidence and clarity in my decisions of the next steps I should take and a way to evaluate what was working and what wasn't with my child.
03:33 Tara Hunkin:
So let's just take a really quick look at the RAIRE method itself. I'll just explain to you if you're watching this on YouTube or on a website, you can see a graphic of what the RAIRE method is and basically, it's an infinite loop. Now sometimes that overwhelms people in and of itself because they think. Where do we end? Well, it's just that we go through a cycle, an infinite cycle with our children in terms of how we work with them.
03:59 Tara Hunkin:
So the R in the RAIRE method, so RAIRE is an acronym R A I R E and each letter is one step in the process in that infinite loop. Step one is recording and the tool we're gonna be talking about today is actually part of that step one process of recording and we'll get to that in a minute.
04:19 Tara Hunkin:
Step two is analyzing. Step three, the I is for interpret. Now interpret the data that we recorded in step one and then we will take that interpretation to revise our plan that we're working on with our child. If this is the first time that you are creating a plan for your child, then you'd be obviously just starting to create that first plan from that interpretation of the data.
And then the E in RAIRE at the end is execute. So once we revise the plan, we then in step five execute that plan and then we loop back around to, as we're executing the R step one record, we're gonna keep recording that data so we have the best information possible to help make those decisions as we go through that loop again.
05:10 Tara Hunkin:
Very simple; five-step process. Within each of the steps as I mentioned before, we have tools that have been developed to help you through that step. So we have a number of tools in the record step, a lot of trackers, we've talked about those before on Toolkit Tuesday. And then we have tools and guides within and we use the tools in the record for analyzing and interpreting as well and a lot of guides for the interpretation step. Step four, revising. We have tools in there that you can use to then help you revise that plan and lay it out so that you're ready to execute again and guides to help with the execution of the plan.
05:49 Tara Hunkin:
So today we're gonna talk about, as I said, a simple tool, a very simple tool that's in step one of the RAIRE method, which is, is recording the vital data that we use in making decision