illuminating science

Yep, a neat little paper recently shows that the ancient technique of examining a patient’s urine might still be important today. Once a vital technique in Middle Ages diagnosis, it has lately been ignored in favour of more complex, and naturally more accurate, tests. But for a quick and simple check of common conditions, it could still be valuable.

Giving it the rather prosaic name “the uroscopic rainbow”, Dr Carole Foot from Queensland’s Prince Charles Hospital has made a guide which translates the colour of your pee into a medical diagnosis. For instance, a common sedative in critical care wards will turn your urine pink if dosed correctly, but green if you’re getting too much. Or, pink urine could be gout - you’ve got to be careful there.

Want to check if your patient is taking their tablets? Some drugs change the colour of your urine, so the nurses can quickly check whether you actually palming the drugs off the black market (mmm, antibiotics…) And if your urine is blue/green - you’re drinking too much mouthwash. (Though, honestly, if you’re drinking mouthwash, you’ve probably got more serious issues to deal with.)

Although it’s quite a humorous topic, if this catches on, it may be that urine samples will become a more mainstream part of hospital life.

While on the subject of medicine, another article on ABC was about harvesting stem cells from menstrual blood. Unfortunately, they only say you can get “30 times more than bone marrow” which doesn’t really give any quantitative measure of whether this is useful, or just interesting! (Incidentally, the article has a picture of an attractive young girl which kind of jars with the rest of the article - the caption links it in by saying the younger women have better quality stem cells in the menstrual blood, but my first response was to imagine that she’s menstruating and/or providing the samples for the study - surely a more scientific picture would have been more appropriate?)