"bones" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 20:18:24 GMT, Ken Fortenberry
wrote:

bones wrote:
163 total

No expert on this but have a bit of personal experience with this and . . .
Beware of Doc's who are still using total # as a screen. . . its the
components you need to track (good and bad C), and the ratios, as well as
the triglyiserides. That said mine ain't so good and my total is similar to
yours. My guess is that you probably have a handle on it, so my advise is
meant for the broader group.

Doc should cut you copies of whole lipids panel results . . . same for other
tests (liver function etc) . You paid for it, you should get a copy. If
your Doc won't break it down or share the reports, **** can him/her. There
are Docs who skated by in stat and who misinterpret the reports. Its easy
to check yourself if you were half awake back in college, or even if you
have to brush up; the stats they use in these tests are very basic stuff.
(Actually some of it is so primitive as to make you shudder, and some of the
specious stuff used in drug trials is even worse, but that is another rant).

And . . . take the test measures (lipids panel, good and bad C levels,
trigl. liver panel etc) and make a simple time series table of the numbers.
Making graphs is even better. the point is to see the trends. The Docs are
just mostly looking at the most current levels, and comparing them to the
current recommended and warning levels. They usually don't have time to work
up their own time series. I bring MY time series in and we add the most
recent test results. Docs WANT to practice good medicine and they know that
the time series is a better context for comparison that just the most recent
results. If the DOC doesn't want to see the time series . . . you gotta
wonder.

Side note: Early on in my heart problem sojourn I was reading a lipids panel
test from a major hospital lab, and a ratio looked funny. I checked back to
get the component numbers and did the calculation manually myself. Long
story short . . . I found that there was an error in the computerized
calculation which I called in. Checking back on earlier tests I found the
same discrepancy. The calculation was simple but the programming was sloppy.
Lesson: techies rarely get it right the first time, "fixing" **** is what
justifies keeping them around; you need to learn more about the common test
metrics yourself.

Dave
Ideology Sucks