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Most medical diagnosis goes like this: you see a symptom, this could be caused by a dozen entirely different problems. A few of them can be easily ticked off by
by usrusr 3y ago
Most medical diagnosis goes like this: you see a symptom, this could be caused by a dozen entirely different problems. A few of them can be easily ticked off by absence of some very clear flags in the lab result list. Others only have indicators that are much less clear, that are shared with a whole bunch of other outside-the-norm conditions, many of them perfectly fine. If you have a backlog, if instead of a list of current measurements you have a matrix of current and previous measurements, you can narrow it down much more.
- haldujai 3y agoNot really, very few diagnoses benefit from such historical data. Any lab value flagged as abnormal is typically >95%ile meriting some form of further investigation (whether that’s continued follow up/repeat blood work or a different test depends on what we’re talking about). The tests that could be physiologic for a patient outside of reference ranges (e.g. mild LFT elevations) will often just get repeated to establish stability as you propose. There isn’t a compelling argument to do this prospectively before symptoms start.