Your doctor says everything looks fine, but you still feel terrible. The problem might not be your health but how labs define “normal.” Understanding the difference between normal and optimal could ...

Run-of-the mill? Middle of the road? Typical? The chance that you are correct is vanishingly small. If you're a clinician, like me, you get a LOT of medical questions. While we've all been asked to ...

Have you heard of the stress hormone? It is called cortisol. As an essential hormone, cortisol is made by the adrenal glands sitting atop the kidneys. It is called the stress hormone because cortisol ...

Steffini Stalos, DO, FCAP, is a pathology and lab medicine physician. She is also the chief medical officer of the lab consultancy firm Blood Associates, LLC. Mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration ...

Labs calculate normal by testing everyone who walks through the door, including patients with undiagnosed conditions and chronic diseases. The middle 95 percent becomes the reference range, whether ...