Stop Googling your lab results. Do this instead.

Today's Tip: Understand Your Lab Results Before You See the Doctor

The 15 minutes you spend talking to your doctor about blood work? You can walk in already knowing what every number means… and what to ask about.

Let me explain…

My friend Marta is 64. She's a retired librarian in Tampa… the kind of person who still reads the newspaper over coffee and keeps a paper calendar on the fridge.

Last month she had her yearly physical. The next morning her patient portal pinged… blood work was back. She opened it on her phone and saw a wall of numbers. ALT. A1C. eGFR. Three little red flags next to things she had never heard of.

Her follow-up appointment was two weeks away. Two weeks of worrying… or two weeks of searching WebMD and scaring herself worse. She called me.

I told her to take a screenshot of the whole report, open a free AI tool, upload the picture, and paste in the prompt I'm about to share with you.

Twenty minutes later she had a plain-English explanation of every single number, a list of five smart questions to ask her doctor, and — this is the part that surprised her — a note that one of her "red flag" numbers was probably nothing to worry about given her age and her other results. (Her doctor confirmed it a week later.)

I'll be honest… I was skeptical about this one for a long time. Medical stuff is where AI can get sloppy. But used correctly — as a translator, not a diagnostician — it is one of the most useful things you can do with these tools. A recent Journal Sentinel story described patients doing exactly this to prepare for appointments, and Quest Diagnostics launched its own AI tool for the same purpose this past March.

Here's the prompt that does it…