[2026 update] Building a sensible monitoring schedule with your prescriber

Posting this under the heading it deserves: Building a sensible monitoring schedule with your prescriber Everything below is what sits behind that.

Reading back through what has been written here about Building a sensible monitoring schedule, three questions come up every time and only one has ever been answered properly.

Listing all three, with what I think the state of the answer is for each, so the thread can start further along than the last one did.

Worth separating two things that the opening post runs together.

The strongest argument against my own position on Building a sensible monitoring schedule, stated as well as I can state it, since nobody else has yet.

I changed my mind about Building a sensible monitoring schedule after someone here asked me for the source and I could not produce one. That is worth saying out loud because it is the ordinary way it happens.

Time of day: some biomarkers vary across the day. Cortisol in the morning differs from cortisol in the evening. Comparing results from different times of day is comparing things that are not the same.

I would want to see it done twice before believing it once.

Adding the boring version of Building a sensible monitoring schedule, because the interesting version keeps getting posted and the boring one is usually right.

Check the ordinary explanations, in order, and stop when one of them accounts for what you are seeing. Most of the time the second one does.