Reading blood work well means resisting the urge to sort everything into simply normal or abnormal. But what happens when the real diagnosis lives in the relationships between markers, not the markers themselves?

Dr. Jessica Parker is an acupuncturist and lab-work educator who teaches practitioners to read blood panels through a Chinese medicine lens. In this conversation, she joins Michael to explore the gap between conventional ranges and true optimal health.

Listen in as they trace her path from a formative year in Hangzhou, where East and West medicine shared the same pharmacy shelf, to teaching acupuncturists to read cortisol, cholesterol, and thyroid markers as stories of stress and imbalance; how spleen-chi deficiency hides inside ordinary lab numbers; and why cortisol has been unfairly demonized online.