Spending Time At The Laboratory

Without Laboratories, Men Of Science Are Soldiers Without Arms

_Louis Pasteur

Going to scientific laboratories is not what we do often as students studying medicine and surgery specifically... It's not that we don't need the skills or something like that, but just that, our tutors always feel we can know those ones later as these laboratory works have been designated for the medical laboratory scientists students.
Emphasis rather is made on how the laboratory results should be interpreted, to know when the values are within normalcy range and when they are deranged to commence treatment.

Designed using Canva

However, there are few of these laboratory procedures that we ought to be able to perform so that we don't get to wait for the laboratory scientists when we are in emergency situations and the most important one of them is Blood grouping.

Blood grouping is a test that is done to determine the compatibility of the patient's (recipient) and donor's bloods before commencing blood transfusion (comparing the recipient's antibodies against the donors antigens)

A medical term "agglutination" occurs when there is a transfusion between contrasting antigens and antibodies... In other words, the bloods didn't match and it might lead to the death of the patient if not discovered on time.
In a clearer explanation, the bloods will be clumping together rather than remaining In the liquid form and this is very disastrous to the patient you want to treat.

This was the laboratory procedure we were taught when I was in 4th year of studies. We didn't however make use of the laboratory because of our large number but however the reagents were provided for us.

We were however all dressed in our white medical laboratory coats.

The lecturers took turn to educate us more on the relevance of the practical session and how disastrous it could be when misinterpreted before we finally delved into the practical aspect.

Emphasis was also made on the importance of protecting ourselves properly before commencing any blood grouping tests especially wearing gloves.
We were strongly advised to stay off performing this procedure when we have open wounds on our body as we are exposing ourselves to whatever the patient has.

There are many blood groups but the most important ones medically remains the ABO blood group plus the Rhesus blood group.

People with blood group O are called Universal Donors because they have no antigen while people with blood group AB are called Universal Recipients because they have no antibody.

This is a very important skill we needed because most times as a doctor, you will be facing a lot of anaemic patients especially when it comes with the Paediatrics unit and you need to know how to do and interpret this test before commencing treatment hence, you will end up doing more harm than good.

It really felt good learning this important aspect of medicine. It is always said that Medicine is both an art and a science, here proves the art aspect once more... The point you have to be an apprentice and learn from the foot of your seniors who are already practicing just like when you will learn the art of performing surgeries also.

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N:B: Pictures Used Are Mine

Thanks for reading and have a nice day 👍