Your blood results

In range answers whether you are unwell.

It was never asked whether this is the level at which you function well. Those are different questions, and almost nobody is told that they are.

Your results are read alongside your symptoms, your life stage and what has been asked of you, because a number never exists without the person. Conventional interpretation is always given first. Where specialists genuinely disagree, you will see the disagreement rather than one side of it.

Your results

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Ferritin 15–300TSH 0.4–4.5Vitamin B12 180–900Vitamin D 25–200HbA1c 20–41CRP 0–5Magnesium 0.7–1.0

What else is true for you

These change how a result reads. The same number in a different life is a different finding.

What your Blueprint would say

Nothing entered yet.

Nothing to raise from this.

Which is its own answer. Enter a result near the edge of a range, or add something about your life, and the reasoning appears.

The number never exists without the person

A ferritin of 25, read seven ways.

One value, inside the range in every case. These are not caveats added to a finding. Each is a different finding, and which one you get depends on what we know about you.

With inflammationWith inflammation in the picture this number cannot be taken at face value. Ferritin rises when the body is inflamed, so stores may be lower than this suggests. The result is genuinely ambiguous rather than reassuring, and it is the one situation where a normal ferritin means least.

After childbirthIn the first year after birth this reads quite differently. Blood is lost at delivery, the demands are relentless, and the tiredness has an obvious explanation that it gets attributed to entirely. This is the window in which low iron is most often missed.

With heavy periodsWith heavy periods iron is being spent faster than it is usually replaced, so a number like this is a position on a downward slope rather than a level.

MenstruatingIn somebody who menstruates the floor of the range is where the next period starts from rather than a resting place, so well within it is closer to what functioning well asks for.

Training seriouslyIn somebody training seriously this would be treated as low by most sports medicine practitioners, who have worked with iron and performance for decades and tend to act sooner than general practice would.

After menopauseAfter menopause there is no monthly loss to explain low iron, which makes the question different: not whether to top it up, but why it is low at all. That is worth a conversation rather than a supplement.

In a manIn a man there is no routine explanation for low iron, so the useful question is where it is going rather than how to replace it.

What this will not do

It will not tell you your result is wrong, or that your doctor was wrong. It will not name a dose. It will not present a second range as a target. Where a result is outside the laboratory range it says so immediately and stops reasoning, because beyond the range is where conventional medicine is genuinely best.

This is education rather than medical care, and it does not replace your doctor. What it can do is help you walk into an appointment able to ask a better question than you could before.

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