Clinical Chemistry

Clinical Chemistry When people consider their careers in the health care field, most of them would think about being a physician, a nurse or a surgeon. Individuals with interest in the health care field are not aware of clinical laboratory science. I am one of those individuals who don’t know much about clinical laboratory science before. After taking the class “Introduction to Clinical Laboratory Science”, I start to realize that clinical laboratory scientists are just like other health care members. They play an important role in the health care field by performing many tests in order to help the doctors to give diagnosis to the patients. They also participate in the investigation of new clinical techniques (Pitocco). Clinical laboratory science can be separated into several divisions which include hematology, microbiology, immunology, chemistry, cytogenetics and histocompatibility. Among all these different divisions, clinical chemistry is the area that interests me the most. In this paper, I will introduce the role of clinical chemistry in the health care field and some clinical chemistry tests in medicine.
The Clinical Chemistry department is involved in the study and measurement of chemical substances in blood and other body fluids (Pitocco). With just a small amount of whole blood or serum, many body systems can be analyzed. The results of these measurements and observations are relevant to the causes and extent of diseases. Clinical chemistry is the application of biochemical scientific knowledge and techniques for medical testing and using those results to diagnosis, prognosis, and improve healthcare. Today, Clinical chemistry plays an essential role in disciplines such as cardiac care, poisoning, forensic workplace, infectious disease testing, and personalized medicine. As a discipline, it is a fundamental branch of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine (MCW).
The clinical chemistry test has developed into a valuable aid for localizing pathologic