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Stepwise Success

Rules and Algorithms
November 6, 2009 6:26 AM by Scott Warner
Just the other day a question of how to alert physicians of laboratory reflex rules came up. After all, everyone's rules are slightly different. Examples: if the dipstick is positive for blood or leukocyte esterase, perform a microscopic examination of Read More...
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Teachable Moments
October 14, 2009 6:25 AM by Scott Warner
Much was made of the President's "beer summit" last July, a meeting between a black professor and the white policeman who arrested him, something the Wall Street Journal labeled a "teachable moment." Aside from wondering what kind of beer goes best with Read More...
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Calculations
September 8, 2009 6:17 AM by Scott Warner
Most of us aren't mathematicians. Well, I'm not. I've known people who are just better at "seeing" math than myself. I've always struggled to add a column of figures in my head, forget solving Fermat's Last Theorem . Which has been solved already. Just Read More...
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Package Inserts
September 2, 2009 6:14 AM by Scott Warner
In writing a procedure, I strive to make it the reference on the bench. Yet no matter how good a written procedure is, the package insert is always invaluable. There are two reasons for this. One, the package insert is the main reference for any procedure Read More...
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A New Marker
April 8, 2009 4:26 AM by Scott Warner
When I spoke with the diaDexus rep the other day on the telephone, he told me the PLAC test , a new test that measures lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A 2 (Lp-PLA 2 ), is being done in forty labs across the US, with another added every two weeks. Read More...
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I Got My Answer From the Nurse
January 28, 2009 3:02 PM by Scott Warner
A hospital receptionist concerned about a lab report on her son came into the lab asking what a "bicarb" level meant. I printed a page from Lab Tests Online , a resource I often use for patients. When I walked it down the hall to her desk, she was putting Read More...
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Smear Art
August 11, 2008 11:48 AM by Scott Warner
Little these days is not automated. The art of laboratory medicine is vanishing, from spectrophotometers to Folin-Wu filtrates to Lee-White clotting times. I'd wax poetic about the meditative lure of bench work, but I don't miss mouth pipetting , spit Read More...
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Understanding Tests
April 28, 2008 1:20 PM by Scott Warner
It is the laboratory scientist's responsibility to make a test choice clear for the physician. We can be expected to reasonably interpret an order that doesn't match a menu name (AST for SGOT, for example). Other times, a questionable order is a methodology Read More...
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Quick and Dirty, Part One
March 13, 2008 1:21 PM by Scott Warner
As a programmer on the coast of Maine 20 years ago, I liked a quick and dirty solution--the inelegant, simplistic, but often workable idea. Scientists call this lex parsimoniae or Occam's Razor (after a 14 th century English logician), which states the Read More...
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