Do I really need bloodwork every 3 months? It is expensive — need advice

Answering the narrow version, because the broad one does not have a single answer. 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.

TrialNerd_Beth 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…

Agreed, and reference ranges are laboratory-specific. Comparing your number to somebody else's range, or to a screenshot from another country, is how people convince themselves something is wrong.

gary_naperville 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.

Clinical perspective, offered as context rather than as advice.

Blood work came back perfect. baseline bloodwork + this community = winning. 🏆