My bloodwork is SO much better - showing my doctor was worth it — March 2026

This one has a reasonably settled answer, so here it is. A defensible baseline is short: HbA1c and fasting glucose, a lipid panel with ApoB if you can get it, ALT and AST, creatinine with eGFR, TSH, ferritin and B12, and a full blood count. That set catches the things that change, the things that explain symptoms, and the things that alter the prescribing decision. Almost everything else on the long circulating lists is either invariant, uninterpretable without a specific question, or an incidental finding waiting to cause an unnecessary workup.

PharmacoVig_BOS said:

A defensible baseline is short: HbA1c and fasting glucose, a lipid panel with ApoB if you can get it, ALT and AST, creatinine with eGFR, TSH, ferritin…

That is correct as far as it goes, and here is where it stops going. One addition: if the lab changes analytical platform between your draws, the comparison breaks and nobody tells you. It is worth asking when a value moves inexplicably.

carl_compliance said:

I got a full panel before starting and a repeat at three months, and the second one is more useful than the first purely because I now have something…

Same position here, arrived at the long way round. The single most useful discipline is bringing the whole panel to a clinician rather than one flagged value. One out-of-range result in isolation generates anxiety and unnecessary tests; the same result next to the trend and the rest of the panel usually generates a shrug.

Adding the clinical framing, because it changes how the question reads.

Shot day Friday report relevant to baseline bloodwork:

Week 42. Currently on 5mg. Down 78 lbs from starting weight of 290 lbs.

This week's observations: Slight injection site redness, resolved in 24h.

Labs due next week — looking forward to seeing the metabolic panel. I'll post results in the Lab Results section when they come in.