Talk:Medical test

A test may examine treatments/drugs/other factors than disease

I have tried a couple of times to make the definition broader to cover more of the range of medical tests. Since the phrasing has evidently not been acceptable to other editors, please help in coming up with phrasing that is clearer or more acceptable. The last version of the lead sentence that I tried was:

A medical test is a kind of medical procedure performed to detect, diagnose, or evaluate disease, disease processes, susceptibility, or treatment.

The "or treatment" part is what keeps being removed. An example of the type of test that isn't covered by the current definition would be a measure of coagulation factors (e.g. Prothrombin time) used in monitoring Warfarin anticoagulation therapy. i.e. evaluation of a treatment so can adjust the dose. This is not a disease or disease process that is being evaluated. (There may be no disease present - e.g. anticoagulation may be as a preventative measure for those with a pacemaker.) There are lots of other examples where the test checks for presence or amount of a nutritional, therapeutic or other agent, which may not be part of a disease. Now, how to say that clearly and concisely? Zodon (talk) 09:54, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

The "or treatment" belongs, but it feels grammatically out of context when inserted in the sentence as such. It would work in a second sentence or two, though, where you explain about 'testing to determine dosage, ...nutritional, ...therapeutic, etc.' Maybe start with 'In addition, medical tests are used to... yada, yada'. Heh. It's hard sometimes to find the wording. --Rcej (talk) 09:34, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Alternative classification

The following classification was found in the article of diagnostic test, but it appears to refer to medical tests in general, and therefore I linked that article to this one instead. The list is found below, but, in my point of view, its entries should be sorted into the multimodal classification system found here in medical test. Any assistance in this task is appreciated.

Types of medical tests Consulting room tests auscultation, including listening with a stethoscope weighing, and measuring height and girth measuring blood pressure taking the patient's pulse breath tests reflex tests eye examination ophthalmoscopy hearing test digital rectal examination vaginal examination More invasive examinations requiring sterile procedures biopsies lumbar puncture Requiring laboratory analysis Urine tests Stool tests Saliva tests Hair tests Blood tests Erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) Complete blood count (CBC) Comprehensive metabolic panel (CMP) Arterial blood gas (ABG) Genetic_testing Requiring microscopy Smear tests such as Pap smears Requiring elaborate medical equipment X-rays barium enema intravenous pyelogram (IVP test) functional MRI endoscopy colposcopy blood test

Mikael Häggström (talk) 09:10, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

@Mikael Häggström:I think this type of classification is interesting also because it's more practical. It's a classification based on the tools/hospital departments used. It makes sense since the tool used can be very important for the patient (in term of discomfort, price etc...). Linuxo (talk) 09:23, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Evaluation-section

I specified the evaluation-section as "Monitoring" and removed the other aspects mentioned in that section because they were not clearly distinct from diagnostic tests, and the reference didn't clearly point out any difference either. [1] Mikael Häggström (talk) 17:40, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Proposal to Merge In vitro diagnostics into Medical Test

Organisation of medical test pages

There are already several overlapping pages covering types of medical tests: Clinical chemistry, clinical laboratory, Molecular diagnostics, as well as pages listing them by use (Screening (medicine), Monitoring (medicine))

The risk is that we create a new encyclopaedia entry for each one - regarding it as a notable attested topic - and because the topics overlap heavily reproduce much of the same content.

I'm not about to propose a big re-organisation, but folding IVD into medical tests would help.

Lack of Content

The IVD page has existed since 2006, but is still a stub; the only content it contains is a long quoted definition and a few examples.

That is by itself, evidence of overlap. Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a dictionary.

When you look at how regulators define "in vitro diagnostics", you find that they don't regulate any other kind of diagnostics. In short, and at the risk of Wikipedia:Original research, it looks like "in vitro diagnostics" is jargon for "the kind of diagnostics we regulate". In other words, it was always more of a definition than a topic anyway.

Move to Wiktionary?

If apt, it would be good to move the lede to Wiktionary.

Ian McDonald (talk) 09:47, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Merge Note

Am merging now, mainly by adding more info about "in vitro diagnostics" to the "by method" section.

I am not merging:

• the long quote about regulation of IVD devices
• [2] - because it is not needed as citation and backs nothing up
• Immunoassay - too narrow in relevance; is a molecular diagnostics technique
• Reference ranges for blood tests - very narrow indeed; but the new page links to blood tests

I added it to Wiktionary but MGlovesFun deleted the definition - based on the Lede - as simply wrong and not idiomatic. See [discussion on Wiktionary:User_Talk:MGlovesFun]

Ian McDonald (talk) 18:42, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Merge "diagnostic test" to here, medical test

There was an article, diagnostic test. I just made it a redirect to this article.

• Diagnostic test, 30 June 2016 archive version

See the deletion discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Diagnostic test.

I am not merging any content from that older version to here, because I do not feel that any of the content there is good enough to be moved here. In particular, that information is mostly without references. The references which are used are low quality.

Anyone might make a new "diagnostic test" article with better sources. A new article might have a medical focus, or might be diagnostic tests for machine repair, software, or any other field which uses diagnostic processes. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:31, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Direct to consumer testing and regulatory landscape

Given the recent meltdown with Theranos and the growing availability and use of direct-to-consumer lab testing as part of consumer-driven healthcare(see graph in 2016 article), it seems like we should do a better job covering this area. I don't have time right now but I'm setting myself a reminder for mid-2017 to come back to this.

There are also some weird players in the market who are not direct-to-consumer such as Doctor's Data and Geneva Diagnostics (formally called the Great Smokies Diagnostic Laboratory (pioneer of "laboratory functional testing"- which seem to cater towards rather unconventional (i.e., alternative / weakly proven) diagnostic tests and treatments. Surprisingly, we don't have an article on Geneva Diagnostics despite the fact that it seems to be much larger than Doctor's Data (with revenue probably at least $100m / year)- seems a bit tricky to find critical analysis of it though, need to search for Great Smokies instead. II | (t - c) 07:14, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

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Footnote 3 is dead

I tried to follow the link for footnote 3 and I got a page telling me the page had moved or no longer existed. Shmeebers (talk) 00:54, 11 October 2018 (UTC)