health Archives - Michael Bianco

European Experiment: Cholesterol & HA1C After Two Months of Living In Italy

I’ve been fighting my cholesterol for a couple of years at this point. This past summer, I lived in Italy for two months, ate whatever I wanted, and my cholesterol dropped by nearly 50% and my HA1C didn’t change. Below is the full story! Background Why even track your cholesterol and HA1C levels? After I was diagnosed with methane-dominant SIBO (confirmed by FoodMarble) in my early 30s, I was motivated to find the root cause. I started paying attention to my bloodwork and discovered I had high cholesterol. Not only was it possible that these were tied to SIBO, but I learned that these elevated levels, if not reduced, could cause many more health issues down the line. That was just enough incentive for me to start owning my health data…

Automatically Download and Rename Your LabCorp PDFs

Over the last couple of years, I’ve incrementally tried to improve my understanding of my health. Part of this is understanding my lab work and collecting the data in a way that I can personally understand and analyze it. In order to do this, I needed to download all of my past LabCorp PDFs. My goal in downloading these PDFs is to funnel them into my custom GPT, which will extract the results into a nicely formatted CSV that I can then copy and paste into Google Sheets. This enables me to easily graph, chart, and otherwise analyze my blood work results. Given the lack of a straightforward way to download all PDFs from the LabCorp website, I created scripts to automate the downloading and renaming of the PDFs for easier analysis and storage…

Using ChatGPT to Convert LabCorp PDFs into a Google Sheet

The last couple of years I’ve monitored my food, blood levels, etc more closely. It’s a topic for another blog post, but it’s been really interesting to watch how key blood levels have changed over time and reacted to changes in my diet and exercise. I use lab core for all my blood work, and I’ve been relatively happy with them. However, their online portal does not allow you to download a CSV or Excel document of your blood work over time. They only offer a PDF download. This makes it challenging to track your levels over time and understand what’s changing and why due to lifestyle changes. Enter ChatGPT. With the latest vision models, you can use it to extract tabular data from the unstructured PDF that LabCorp provides you…

Downloading Fidelity Charitable & Cigna Health Records

Similar to my post about Amazon Photos and Wealthfront data extraction, here’s another set of scripts to download data from sites which have terrible interfaces. You can use both of these scripts by opening up the developer console and copy/pasting/executing them. Hopefully it saves someone some time! Download All Cigna Medical Claim PDFs This script will download all medical claim PDFs on Cigna over the last year. First, navigate to the claims summary page. Then set the filter to: view all, last year, for all people. Now execute this script: Here’s more explanation on why this trick works…

Tag: health