Additional Patient Resources | Lab Tests Online-UK

Lab Tests Online-UK is designed to help you, the patient or caregiver, understand the what, why, and how of laboratory testing. To access the primary resources on this website, you can go to the full listings below:

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In-depth Feature Articles

To learn more about laboratory medicine in general and gain a greater understanding of how laboratory testing can impact your healthcare, read the following in-depth articles. These patient resources are intended to help you navigate the testing process, provide context for the tests that you may have done and give you a better understanding of your test results.

Cellular Pathology

Cellular pathology, also known as anatomical (or anatomic) pathology is the branch of pathology that involves the study of body organs and tissues (groups of cells). Cellular pathology is considered one of the diagnostic branches of medicine, along...

Test Preparation: Your Role

One of the most important factors in making sure your laboratory test is accurate and reliable is you, the patient. After all, it is a sample from your body – blood, urine, or some other specimen – on which the test will be performed. It is therefore...

Coping with Test Pain, Discomfort, and Anxiety

Nobody particularly enjoys having blood collected or providing a urine or stool sample, but a medical test conducted on a small sample collected from your body can give your doctor information that can improve the quality of your life or even save it...

Collecting Samples for Testing

Today's technologies allow testing on an impressively wide variety of samples collected from the human body. Most often, all that is required is a blood sample. However, samples of urine, saliva, sputum, faeces, semen, and other bodily fluids and...

The World of Forensic Laboratory Testing

Forensic testing isn't always the way it appears on TV. On the popular TV shows, staff from a forensic laboratory solve a number of crimes within the show's hour-long format, presenting forensic testing as quick producers of irrefutable evidence that...

How Reliable is Laboratory Testing?

For many people, clinical laboratory testing is an invisible side of medical care. Yet many of the decisions that doctors make about your health – diagnosing the cause of symptoms, developing a course of action and a treatment plan, or monitoring...

Home Testing

Home testing offers several benefits including convenience and privacy, but it is important to understand that home tests may not be as accurate as hospital tests, and depend on you following the instructions provided very carefully. In hospitals the...

Reference Ranges & What They Mean

For basic rules that can help you to make sense of your results, see Reading your results. The interpretation of any clinical laboratory test involves comparing the patient's results with the test's "reference range". The first step in determining a...

The Universe of Genetic Testing

This article discusses genetic testing; that is, testing that looks at a person’s genetic makeup for a variety of reasons. An increasing number of genetic tests are becoming available as a result of recent and rapid advances in biomedical research...