Most health programmes give you a protocol. The TDG Five-Test Programme gives you something different: a clinical picture built by a system that has been refined across 37 years of sitting across from real people with real complaints, running real tests, and asking what the data actually shows.
This page describes what that system contains — the analytical infrastructure that turns five laboratory tests into a coherent, personalised understanding of what is driving your health picture and what to do about it.
The Most Important Clinical Reframe
The "bad" findings are your good news.
Every client arrives with symptoms — fatigue, hormonal disruption, gut dysfunction, pain, mood that has been flat for longer than they can remember. They have often been told, repeatedly, that their tests are normal. The functional tests frequently find significant abnormality. And this is not bad news. This is the best possible news. You came with problems you could not explain. Now we can see exactly what is driving them. The more the tests reveal, the more precisely we can intervene. The clearer the picture, the more targeted the protocol. A completely normal set of functional results would leave us with almost nothing to work with. A picture full of findings gives us a map. Every finding is a direction. Every marker that is outside optimal range is a step in the protocol that addresses it. This is what investigation looks like. This is what resolution becomes possible from.
The Analytical System
42 Clinical Tools — Built for Your Specific Situation
The practice portal contains a suite of specialised analytical tools — each designed to interpret a specific domain of functional health and contribute to the complete clinical picture. No single tool gives the full answer. Together they give a picture that no standard consultation can produce.
Plus 30+ additional specialised tools covering food sensitivity interpretation, thyroid function analysis, cardiovascular risk assessment, immune pattern analysis, mineral balance, adrenal assessment, and more.
The Nutrition Integration Engine
Six Layers of Personalisation — Resolved Into One Protocol
Generic dietary advice ignores the most important variable: you. The Nutrition Integration Engine resolves six layers of individual data into a single coherent nutritional protocol — one that works with your constitutional biology, your test results, and your actual life simultaneously.
1
Metabolic Nature Phenotype
Your constitutional metabolic baseline — the oxidative rate and autonomic pattern that determines your optimal macronutrient ratios, food types, and meal timing. This is the foundation layer. Every subsequent layer adjusts around it.
2
Food Sensitivity Exclusions
IgG-mediated reactive foods identified by the food sensitivity panel are removed from the type-appropriate list — regardless of whether they are theoretically optimal for your Metabolic Nature. A food cannot be therapeutic if your immune system reacts to it.
3
Digestive Ceiling
The GI-MAP reveals your current digestive capacity — stomach acid output, pancreatic enzyme production, intestinal permeability, and microbial balance. The protocol is adjusted to what your digestive system can currently process, not what it theoretically should be able to handle.
4
Blood Chemistry Modifications
Specific blood chemistry findings — elevated homocysteine, insulin resistance, thyroid conversion impairment, nutritional deficiencies — modify the dietary recommendations. The test results override theoretical type recommendations where there is a specific biochemical indication.
5
DUTCH and OAT Adjustments
Cortisol pattern, oestrogen metabolism, testosterone status, melatonin, and organic acid findings from the DUTCH Plus and OAT further refine the nutritional approach. Hormonal findings have specific dietary implications — a client with elevated 4-OH oestrogen requires different food emphasis than one with low progesterone.
6
Implementation Context
Financial constraints, cooking capacity, time, cultural food practices, religious considerations, and schedule all modify the final protocol. The best nutritional protocol is the one that can be followed. A theoretically optimal protocol that is practically impossible is clinically worthless.
Before the Tests Arrive
18 Intake Forms — Building the Clinical Picture From Day One
The intake process begins before a single test result arrives. Eighteen structured assessment forms map every dimension of your health picture — providing the clinical context that makes test interpretation meaningful rather than generic.
Common Questions
What clients ask about the system
Is this available to me as a client, or is it only for the practitioner?
The analytical system operates in the background of every TDG consultation. You don't use the tools directly — you receive the output from them in the form of your clinical report, your written protocol, and the consultation in which the findings are explained. The tools exist to make your investigation more precise, your results more interpretable, and your protocol more personalised. The client experience is a clear, coherent explanation of what your body is doing and why. The system is what makes that explanation possible.
How is this different from a standard functional medicine consultation?
Most functional medicine consultations involve a skilled practitioner interpreting test results using their clinical knowledge. That knowledge varies enormously between practitioners. The Detective Health system codifies 37 years of clinical pattern recognition into a systematic, reproducible analytical framework — so the interpretation is not dependent on memory or intuition alone but on a structured process that accounts for the interactions between findings, the blocking factors that mask the true picture, and the six-layer nutritional integration that produces a protocol specific to your biology, your test results, and your life.
What is the Metabolic Nature assessment and why does it matter?
Your Metabolic Nature is your constitutional metabolic pattern — the oxidative rate and autonomic balance that determine how your body processes food, responds to stress, and requires nutritional support. One of six Metabolic Natures, identified through a scored and weighted assessment and confirmed by functional testing, your Nature determines the dietary framework around which all other nutritional recommendations are built. The same food can be optimal for one Nature and counterproductive for another. The Metabolic Nature assessment is what makes the nutritional guidance in the protocol genuinely personalised rather than generically healthy.
How long has this system been in development?
The system has been built incrementally across 37 years of clinical practice. The Metabolic Nature framework draws on metabolic individuality science going back to Roger Williams (1956) and George Watson (1972). The functional testing integration reflects 15+ years of applying GI-MAP, DUTCH Plus, blood chemistry, and OAT in clinical practice. The specific tools, intake forms, and the six-layer Nutrition Integration Engine are original clinical developments built through iteration across thousands of client cases. This is not a system adapted from an existing framework — it is a clinical system that grew from the work itself.
You came with questions.
The system exists to find the answers.
Every finding the tests reveal — every marker outside optimal range, every pathogen identified, every hormonal pattern mapped — is not bad news. It is a direction. The more the system finds, the more precisely we can act. The clearer the picture, the more targeted the protocol. This is what resolution looks like from the inside.
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