Pain Management
Discover how Main Line Health experts serve Philadelphia by treating a wide range of conditions, including back, neck and oncology-related pain.
Your doctor may order a blood test if you have certain symptoms or conditions, or if disease, such as cancer, is suspected. A blood test can also help your doctor assess your body’s response to medication or treatment, identify risk factors for disease, and check the function of liver, kidneys and heart. Once the blood is drawn it goes to a laboratory for analysis.
Depending on what the doctor is looking for, your blood test may include:
A blood sample is typically taken via a needle in the arm or in some cases by finger prick. There may be mild pain where the needle sticks, but the process is done very quickly by skilled lab workers. Blood tests are either “fasting” or “non-fasting,” meaning you may be asked to not eat or drink anything for 12 hours in advance of the test, or you may proceed to the test at any time, regardless of when you last ate or drank.
Once your blood has been sampled and analyzed, the results are provided to your doctor who will then advise you of the results and any next steps needed. In some cases, you may not get a call back if the result was “negative” (no signs of disease or cause for concern). A “positive” result means that the test indicates there is an abnormality of some sort. Your doctor will thoroughly explain this to you in language that is easy for you to understand.
There can sometimes be “false-positive” or “false-negative” results, meaning that the lab determined there is or is not anything abnormal, when in fact the opposite is true. This can happen as a result of blood contamination during processing, or simply not having enough of a sample to make a correct analysis, or because the underlying condition or disease hasn’t yet manifested in a way that blood sampling can detect it.
It is possible to also have an “abnormal” result, which can be caused, for example, by not meeting the fasting requirements before getting the blood test done
Discover how Main Line Health experts serve Philadelphia by treating a wide range of conditions, including back, neck and oncology-related pain.
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