gary_stocker (00:01.986)
Welcome back to another podcast of Medical Laboratory Science Careers. My name is Gary Stocker.

Today I want to talk about trust in people you don't see. I'm going to draw an analogy between pilots and those folks who work in medical laboratories, medical laboratory scientists. For example, pilots navigate us, obviously from one city to the next, but the folks that work in medical laboratories, those medical laboratory scientists, they really are just as integral as pilots in navigating us to a diagnosis.

Of course it's through doctors and nurses and those kind of things. But medical laboratory scientists do work people don't see, you trust them, to provide you test results, high quality test results, that let doctors navigate to a diagnosis and treatment and even a cure for your diseases.

You don't see them, especially in this day and age. You don't really see pilots that much because the doors are locked almost from the moment we get on airplanes. And the same for those that work in hospital laboratories. You don't see them, yet they're an integral part of the services that are provided. Pilots get us places, as we talked before, medical laboratory scientists do as well, but you trust them to do quality work without really seeing them.

Planes, of course, go anywhere. And diagnoses can go anywhere. When we talk about pilots taking us places, we know where we're going. It's a little bit different in medical laboratories. The work done by medical laboratory scientists can take a diagnosis anywhere, from normal and healthy to something that's very not, that's not normal at all or not healthy at all.

gary_stocker (01:58.658)
But yet in both cases, again, we don't see them. Both pilots and medical laboratory scientists deal with complex science. Yes, it's more aviation and physics for airline pilots. It's more biology and chemistry, microbiology, immunology for medical laboratory scientists. But both are trained to deal with complex sciences. The training piece.

Pilots, of course, don't practice with you in the airplane. They practice with simulators. And the same with medical laboratory scientists. They don't learn how to do your cross-match. They don't learn how to diagnose which bacteria, pathogen may be infecting you, what chemistry analytes, what chemistry tests to run. They practice that in scenarios outside the medical laboratory in most cases. And even air traffic controllers.

We know what they are, they're the folks in those towers. We never see them either. And they provide overall direction to pilots flying everywhere, to any city, to any location. And the same air traffic control analogy holds for medical laboratory scientists. In the background, you don't see them, but they're really providing direction to physicians, nurses, and even other allied health professionals like pharmacists, radiologists, nutritionists.

dietary folks and others on the best treatment route for patients in healthcare, for your healthcare. So it's always interesting to think about the folks that we don't see. And in this episode, we tried to draw that connection between airline pilots and medical laboratory scientists. And we see if you're interested in science, and if you're interested in healthcare, that medical laboratory science is a career with many things, many attributes, similar to what pilots do.

And it's a career that offers you a chance to make a difference in people's lives, just like pilots do when they get you and I to see our loved ones or on vacation for relaxation or anything like that. If you're considering a career in medical laboratory science, I'll have some contact information in the description below this podcast. We'll see you next time on Medical Laboratory Science Careers.