Thank you for using our hospital. We would like to inform you that our hospital has introduced testing machine for allergy test.
We have often heard from patients about their requests for allergy test, and each time we provide the following explanation.
There are two issues to consider for conducting the test. The first issue is the clinical significance of an allergy blood test. Although a blood test is a simple test, there is no change in subsequent treatment or progress observing whether the result is positive or negative.
You may be a little surprised, but even if the test result is positive, it may not actually be the cause of your symptoms, and even if the test result is negative, it may be the cause. And it is not a negligible probability (the false positive rate is said to be 20-50%). Blood tests are only for reference.
The second problem is the pain children feel. Of course, if the test is necessary, it may be unavoidable to perform a painful test. However, regarding the first problem mentioned above, in cases where there is little clinical significance, it is my opinion that we do not want to cause unnecessary pain.
I have given the same explanation as above, but of course I didn’t say that “I will never test it!” We have tested children especially if the child is willing to undergo testing.
So why did we introduce allergy test machine?
As I mentioned at the beginning, I understand that there are many patients who want to be tested, so I think that if we can accept their requests as much as possible, and if we can do it with the least amount of pain, children will be able to tolerate it. I thought about it.
This test device places a thin needle on your fingertip, inserts and removes it in an instant, and tests can be performed using the blood that comes out like a drop. It is clearly less painful than the method of sticking a needle into the elbow and collecting about 5 ml of blood, so I thought it was acceptable.
Of course, this does not mean that the clinical significance has increased, so please note that the results are for reference only.
There is also another point to note. There are 41 fixed test items. The following items will be tested, so if you wish to test for items that do not apply to these items, you will need to perform a blood test from your elbow as before. In that case, we may end up not recommending it as before.
