Meet Graham: reading your labs like a functional wellness coach

Hi, I’m Graham, the functional wellness coach here. My job is to help you make sense of your labs the way a good detective reads a case file: not one clue at a time, but all of them together, looking for the story they tell.

Most of us have had the same experience with bloodwork. You get a printout, a few numbers are flagged red, the rest are green, and someone tells you “everything looks normal.” You leave with no more understanding than you walked in with. I want to change that for you, so let me show you how I actually think about a lab panel.

Start with the trend, not the single reading

One blood draw is a photograph. It catches you on one morning, after one particular week of sleep, stress, hydration, and dinner the night before. What I care about far more is the movie: where a marker was six months ago, a year ago, two years ago.

A ferritin of 60 doesn’t mean much on its own. But a ferritin that was 120, then 90, then 60 is a direction, and direction is where the useful information lives. When you upload your labs to My Health Optimized, the app charts each marker over time for exactly this reason. Before I comment on any single value, I look at where it came from and where it’s heading.

Optimal ranges, not just “normal” ones

You may have already read our piece on why most lab ranges are too late, and if you haven’t, go read it, because it’s the foundation of everything I do. The short version: conventional reference ranges are built around the average person tested, and the average person isn’t healthy. “Normal” often means “not yet sick enough to flag.”

I won’t repeat that whole argument here. What I’ll add is how it changes the conversation. When your fasting glucose comes back at 96, a conventional read says “fine, under 100.” My read is: that’s drifting toward the edge of insulin resistance, it’s worth watching, and there are gentle, ordinary things (a walk after dinner, more protein at breakfast, better sleep) that tend to pull it back down. Not a crisis. A nudge, delivered years before the conventional system would say a word.

The magic is in the relationships between markers

Here’s what a single flagged value can never tell you: how your systems talk to each other. Bodies don’t run one marker at a time.

A few of the conversations I listen for:

• Thyroid and energy. A TSH sitting at the high end, plus low free T3, plus fatigue and cold hands, plus stalled weight. That cluster tells a richer story than any one of those numbers alone.
• Iron, the full picture. Ferritin, serum iron, transferrin saturation, and hemoglobin together separate “you’re low on iron stores” from “your iron is fine but inflammation is hiding it.” Ferritin alone can fool you, because it rises with inflammation.
• Inflammation and everything. A quietly elevated hs-CRP colors how I read the rest of the panel, because low-grade inflammation touches metabolism, mood, and recovery.

This is what I mean by connecting the dots. It’s rarely one number. It’s the pattern.

A simple way to read your own panel

You don’t need me to get value from your labs. Try this the next time you get results:

1. Group your markers by system: metabolic (glucose, insulin, A1c, triglycerides), thyroid, iron, inflammation, lipids, vitamins.
2. Within each group, look for agreement or disagreement. Do the numbers tell a consistent story, or is one out of step with its neighbors?
3. Note the direction against your last set of results, not just the range.
4. Write down your questions, the specific ones a pattern raises, and bring them to your clinician.

That last step matters most. I’m not here to replace your doctor; I’m here to help you walk into their office knowing what to ask.

What I can and can’t do for you

I can help you spot drift early, understand what a marker means, see how your systems connect, and prepare better questions. I read your data against optimal ranges and flag patterns worth attention.

What I can’t do, and won’t pretend to, is diagnose a disease, prescribe anything, or override a clinician who has actually examined you. When your doctor has seen you, your history, and your imaging, they know things I can’t from a text summary. My role is to help you engage with their care thoughtfully, not to second-guess it.

If you want to see this in action, get early access at myhealthoptimized.com, upload a recent lab, and watch your markers light up against optimal ranges. Then come say hi to me in the app. Bring your panel, and let’s read it together.

My Health Optimized is a wellness and education tool. It doesn’t diagnose, treat, or prescribe. Always work with your clinician.