Medical tests are a vital tool for healthcare professionals to diagnose and properly treat people for whatever illness or disease they may have.
As a result, the labs that perform them are found everywhere, and depending on where you live and what you’re experiencing, your treatment options may have come from a lab based in Indianapolis, IN, or Cambridge, MA, or even from a medical testing lab in Houston, Texas.
Despite the fact that they’re so important, you may not even know what a medical testing lab is or what they do. Luckily for you, this article intends to remedy that, and we’ll start by explaining exactly what a medical lab is.
What is a Medical Testing Lab?
A medical testing laboratory, also sometimes called a clinical laboratory, are where medical tests are performed that may help diagnose an illness or disease, prevent disease, or even treat it. Typically, these tests closely study and examine living tissue, bacteria, or even viruses.
For performing tests on a patient’s biomatter, it must be kept as fresh as possible. For example, if your blood is drawn and sent to a lab to be examined, it will be kept in a cool location to increase its lifespan until the technicians or doctors have time to look it over. As for bacteria, viruses, and other potentially harmful subjects, the specimens are kept in an environment that not only allows them to thrive—but also keeps the people who study them safe from potential infection.
Specimens kept in a clinical laboratory may only be there until they are examined or may remain until either they die or until the specialists determine they’ve learned all they can from it and decide it must be disposed of. While this may sound concerning, keep in mind that these are run by and for medical professionals, so the environments are as secure and sanitary as possible and all personnel have strict safety protocols they must adhere to at all times.
What Happens in a Medical Testing Lab?
What happens in a medical lab depends on what that particular facility specializes in. For example, a hospital may have access to a medical lab that focuses primarily on samples provided by the patients. These samples are used to assist in diagnosing the problems a patient may be facing and, depending on what was collected, could possibly even serve as a test to see how a part of the body reacts to a specific medication or treatment.
Other facilities may be more focused on the health of the population as a whole instead of focusing on the individual. For instance, these labs may test samples collected from local water supplies to search for contaminants. They may also collect soil samples, run tests to check the air quality, and more.
While these labs focus on large subjects, others, such as those in clinical microbiology or molecular biology, zoom way in and focus on the smallest parts of our lives to keep an eye on them. From studying and observing microorganisms, such as bacteria and fungi, to examining the DNA, molecules, and cells of living things, these labs give us insight on the most fundamental parts of not just ourselves—but the planet as a whole.
What Different Kinds Of Tests Can They Perform?
While the amount of different types of medical labs is a fascinating subject, covering them all here won’t help you understand what kinds of tests a medical lab may perform on your samples to help your doctors diagnose and treat your symptoms. Instead, we’ll focus on the types of tests a medical lab may perform on you or your samples.
Don’t panic if a doctor wishes to perform a test but says that you must swallow something; this may be a barium test or something similar. While there are many reasons why a doctor may hand you a tablet, pill, or liquid and ask you to take or drink it, a barium test is specifically for diagnosing problems in your upper GI tract.
You’ll drink a chalky liquid containing barium, which will allow some parts of your system to show up clearer on X-rays. This will make diagnosing issues in the parts of your body, from your mouth to the beginning of your small intestine, much easier.
Other tests, such as a carbon dioxide or CO2 blood test, will not be performed on you, but instead on a sample from you—which, in this case, would be a blood sample. The blood is one of the most important parts of our body, and it does a wide range of things as a result, from assisting in fighting infection to carrying oxygen to and CO2 away from the different parts of your body.
A CO2 blood test will specifically track the amount of carbon dioxide in your blood. While having too much is a problem, so is having too little, and this test will show exactly how much there is to help diagnose a wide range of illnesses or diseases.
These are just two examples of the common medical tests that can be performed either in or thanks to a medical lab’s testing and research. The list of exactly how many there are is far too long to continue expanding upon here. However, there’s a link above that lists many of the different tests that can be performed, and it explains what is being tested, what it will feel like, and more.
Where Can They Be Found?
Because medical testing is a vital part of diagnosing certain conditions, medical labs can be found not just across the country, but all across the world. While some only work with doctors to test the samples they collect from their patients or with hospitals to ease their burden, others are open to patients and offer a few different kinds of tests for them to have performed.
The results of these tests are usually pretty complex, which is why the labs typically assist doctors who either understand the findings themselves or have access to someone who can help them understand the results. For tests whose results are offered directly to patients, there may be an explanatory page or pamphlet, or the results may be broken down to be simpler so you can understand what was found.
Medical testing is an essential part of the medical field as a whole. Their importance simply cannot be understated, from discovering a diagnosis to aiding in treatment. Now, you hopefully understand what medical labs are and why they’re so vital, and maybe it will make the next time you have to offer a blood or urine sample a bit less stressful.
