Doctor Doctor Give Me the News

Doctor Doctor Give Me The News: Identifying Pathogens Via Microscopy

Mary K Traylor

Excelsior College

July 12, 2013

Exhausted monotone announcements pour in over the intercom system in the family medicine office as I roll my eyes and set my cup of coffee down once again. “Triage you have a call on line 4, triage line 4” if only I could record myself saying the same thing over and over again I mutter to myself as I pick up yet another call from a frantic patient asking for an antibiotic to be sent to the office because they are too sick to come in to the office. I cringe from the hoarse sound of the patient’s voice “You just don’t understand dear I’m coughing so much, I have this green slime coming out, a fever, and my head hurts so bad there’s no way I could drive right now please call something in.” In a perfect world under those circumstances medical professionals would like nothing more than to do that for the patient when they are feeling terrible from being sick. The unfortunate truth is that if the offending pathogen is not identified prescribing antibiotics can do more harm than good. The reason behind this is that different pathogens, such as bacteria react differently to medications due to anatomical differences. There are techniques used to identify these characteristics and these techniques discussed today are microscopy in combination with staining techniques.

When a doctor suspects a patient has a bacterial infection based upon evaluating their symptoms the most useful way of determining how to treat the infection is finding out if the bacteria is gram-positive or gram-negative. In this case the patient will provide a sample of sputum by coughing into a piece of wax paper or any nonporous material to catch the specimen. Tissue is not as good of a choice because you want to be able to smear an adequate amount of the sample without having it absorbed into the tissue. What happens after the nurse leaves with your...