Medical Laboratory Science

The Clinician's Pocket Reference is based on a University of Kentucky manual entitled So You Want to Be a Scut Monkey: Medical Student's and House Officer's Clinical Handbook. The “Scut Monkey” program at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine was first held in the summer of 1979 and was developed by the Class of 1980 to help ease the sometimes frustrating transition from the preclinical to the clinical years of medical school. Based on detailed surveys from the University of Kentucky and 44 other medical schools, the essential information and skills that students should be familiar with at the start of their clinical years was developed.

An attempt is made to cover the most frequently asked basic management questions that are normally found in many different sources such as procedure manuals, laboratory manuals, drug references, and critical care manuals, to name a few. This book is not meant as a substitute for specialty-specific reference manuals; the core information presented is the essential foundation for the new medical student or health care provider beginning to learn hands-on patient care.

"The current edition continues the tradition of partnership between laboratory examinations and the formulation and confirmation of clinical diagnoses followed by monitoring of body functions, therapeutic drug levels, other results of medical treatments, and risk assessment for disease. Beginning with the twenty-first edition, color illustrations have been used throughout the book to accurately and realistically depict clinical laboratory test findings and their analysis. The overriding mission of this book is to incorporate new discoveries and their clinical diagnostic applications alongside the wealth of information that forms the core knowledge base of clinical pathology and laboratory medicine."