Today there are sensitive blood tests for this; they measure
the amounts in the blood of certain chemicals, called enzymes, released when
the heart is damaged. Urine tests are helpful in detecting kidney disease and
other urinary tract disorders and may provide clues to problems elsewhere in
the body, such as diabetes. Today, radioactive isotope scanning is a
sophisticated and vast new area of testing, useful for the detection of disorders
in many different organs. Such scanning is based on the fact that certain
chemical elements tend to be deposited in specific organs, and these elements
can be made slightly and briefly radioactive; then their distribution in the
body can be established with scanning instruments that can pick up their radio-activity and record it on film or paper.
Abnormalities become visible as areas of increased or
decreased radioactivity. Scanning now can be used to pick up thyroid problems;
brain tumors and abscesses; liver cancer, cysts, and abscesses; lung clots; bone tumors;
kidney tumors, cysts, and abscesses; and many more abnormalities including
those of the pancreas, spleen, parathyroid glands, and the heart as well.
Judicious use of tests has always distinguished the best physicians. It would
be a simple matter, of course, for the physician to just order,
indiscriminately, a whole battery of tests-at considerable cost of time and
money for the patient.
Rather than this, physicians have been selective, using the
patient's case history and their personal examinations as guides, determining,
from them what problems if any the patient might be likely to have, and, when
justified, using supplementary tests to explore these problems.