Has anyone dealt with my bloodwork is so much better - showing my doctor was worth it?

Dr.RaviCardio said:

The single most useful discipline is bringing the whole panel to a clinician rather than one flagged value.

No disagreement with Dr.RaviCardio. One condition attached. Quarterly for the first year is convention rather than evidence, and it is defensible for a simple reason: it is roughly the interval over which HbA1c becomes informative again, since it reflects about three months of glycaemia. After the first year, and once doses are stable, annual is reasonable unless something specific is being followed.

Dr.RaviCardio said:

The single most useful discipline is bringing the whole panel to a clinician rather than one flagged value.

This is where I part company with the consensus forming above. I would drop the "get everything" instinct further than this thread does. Every extra test is another chance at a false positive, and incidental findings have their own cost in scans, biopsies and worry.

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.

kate.chem said:

Quarterly for the first year is convention rather than evidence, and it is defensible for a simple reason: it is roughly the interval over which HbA1c…

Adding a me-too, because a thread of one person's experience is not much use.