Thread: What do blood tests not rule out?

What do blood tests not rule out?

Your "standard" blood workup panel looks for NO disease. It just give the doctor a general overview of your internal health. It is up to the doctor to spot any abnormalities, and then order ADDITIONAL tests as needed.

But understand that the end results of metabolism pass through either your liver or your kidneys. So, when the doctor finds something amiss in your liver or kidney readings, he must consider literally HUNDREDS of other diseases.

So the doctor needs other clues, and he must get them from you. So he takes a MEdical Historiy. Are you overweight? Is you skin or eyes discolored? Do you have any sores or lesions or moles? Does your breath smell really bad, or does it smell "sweet" like flowers? What do your finger nails or hair or teeth look like? ALL of these, and more, are symptoms of certain diseases.

Doctors ALSO consider their own experience. Sometghing like a cold or flu is VERY common, and when you get sick you probably have that. But Food Poisoning mimics flu, so maybe you have that? I was recently diagnosed with a vey rare skin disease casued by my immune system. I have six doctors working on me. ONE of them has seen 6 cases in 40 years. ONE of them has studied the disease but never seen a live case. The other four didn't even know the disease existed (but were smart enough to admit it, and refer me to other doctors).

Simply puy, blood tests don;t rule out much of anything. There are exceptions: If you think you are a diabetic, but your A1C Blood Test comes back as "5.1" you are NOT diabetic! So the doctor needs to guess again. Other diseases have specific tests that are NOT part of the "standard" panel. For example, it is possible to determine that you MIGHT have had a heart attack using a special bloo d test. SOME cancers can be detected using blood tests -- especially (obviously) blood cancers. Endocrine problems (pituitary, thyroid, gonads, etc) can often be found using SPECIFIC blood tests.

Blood tests are simply a gathering of more information about your health so that the doctor can make a better, more accurate diagnosis.

Blood tests are done for ONLY the things the doctor has indicated he wants the lab to look at, everything else is generally not tested for because each test costs a lot of money and most insurance coverages don't like to pay for unnecessary lab tests (and most people can't afford to pay out of pocket for tests they don't need). When my doctor fills out my blood test papers and asks the lab to test my blood for cholesterol levels, diabetes and thyroid, that's all the lab tests for--I may have other stuff going on in my blood but those other things go undetected, or at least unreported, since the lab wasn't ordered to test for those things. If your doctor orders a blood test to see if you're pregant, he won't get test results back about diabetes or HIV or Sickle Cell or Tay-Sachs or hemophilia or anything else, just the pregnancy determination. A blood test won't tell a doctor if you have hemorrhoids or acne or athlete's foot or a stroke or a driving test on Friday or a whole lot of other things. they can test for a lot of things using blood so it has to be narrowed down what to test for (each test takes a certain amount of blood to get a good sample to test, and there is a limit to how much blood one person can give before it becomes dire so they have to narrow down what they are looking for).