I guess if you, if you're not experiencing, or maybe if you're experiencing some of the more, like, general symptoms that you can't really attribute to iron right away, if you go into, like, the doctor to get labs done and see and try to, like, assess your iron status, what are the things that you sh- you wanna be looking for?

Yeah, great question.

Straight off the bat, it's important to screen athletes as, as, you know, any coach would know, and female athletes specifically, there's a lot of research out there to endorse the idea that they should be getting their iron checked relatively consistently.

Now, the issue when you go to just a general doctor's appointment and you get bloods done is that you're not actually having your iron assessed per se.

A full blood count doesn't, uh, include any iron-specific panels.

The one that you can look at in a full blood count is your hemoglobin level.

However, looking at that and interpreting iron status from that is like reading the last page of a book and trying to understand the entire book in its context.

Mm.