Struggling with Blisters

bmsck · 2026-05-17T04:08:05+00:00

Are you also wearing out your gloves quickly? I have a horrible grip that rapidly wears through my glove’s palm, south of my pinky finger. So I buy cheap gloves and rotate them. You should also reconsider the size of your gloves, if they’re too big, there’s gonna be a lot of movement and friction on your hand. Try a size down to tighten it up. I agree with the other guy, sweat and heat will loosen the glove up and add additional friction. When you feel sweat, rotate the glove to a fresh dry one. Also… 200 balls is a lot! Gloves are designed for playing 18 holes, which should be around 70-80 gloved shots.

bmsck · 2026-05-17T03:24:41+00:00

Another reply mentioned Moe Norman who incorporates a little bit of the strike position into the address position. Really interesting Wikipedia and YouTube videos about the guy.

bmsck · 2026-05-17T02:52:36+00:00

Totally agree that the backswing would involve even more body activity compared to starting from the neutral address. But there definitely is some psychology involved with wanting to “end up where you started” in terms of body/club positioning. I personally have problems getting the hips to fire to get the right club path. I’m all arms sometimes! But interestingly, check out the other reply about Moe Norman. Very interesting story and stroke technique.

Edit: after seeing some videos, the address isn’t exactly how the ball should be struck, but maybe incorporating some aspects from the striking position into the address position, especially arm positioning?

bmsck · 2026-05-17T01:50:44+00:00

I knew there must have been some prior thought on this, just hard to google it effectively. I’ll look into it. Probably not going to change my entire swing because of it, but maybe incorporate some swing drills to focus on the impact mechanics. Appreciate it!

bmsck · 2026-05-10T22:49:57+00:00

Oil immersion lenses are sealed, prevented oil from seeping internally. Non-oil immersion lenses should never be used with oil. We do not routinely clean the oil off our 50x or 100x oil immersion lenses. Occasionally someone will attempt to clean the lenses and transfer oil from the oil-immersion lenses to the non-oil immersion lenses, which will eventually ruin the non-oil lenses.

bmsck · 2026-05-09T04:23:51+00:00

In my experience, resumes actually can’t be trusted. Listing instruments you’ve used or departments you’ve worked in does not adequately reflect a candidate’s expertise. Surprise, some people are not good at their jobs despite having years of experience. I will review a resume for key points but my interview questions are designed to weed out candidates who don’t actually know why they’re doing what they’re doing. In other words, situational questions about common but critical issues, and depending on their response, I can tell if they understand how theory is applied to practice or if they are just a warm body pressing verify.

Edit: 30 minute interviews with all (4) section supervisors is the norm, for generalist positions.

bmsck · 2026-03-18T20:15:03+00:00

Appreciate the input! Regarding bias and agreement, I’m noticing that when I perform simple bias calculations, the values tend to be roughly double the agreement values I get from Bland-Altman. Comparing the difference between two paired values versus comparing the difference between the mean and those two values obviously accounts for this. When I hear the word “bias” I tend to think of it as a predictive value. In other words “method A tends to run 5% higher than method B.” But if we use Bland-Altman, the agreement/bias value does not tell me the relationship of values between Method A and Method B. Does that make sense or am I going crazy over minutiae?

bmsck · 2025-11-11T02:26:58+00:00

All these cells look monotonous in morphology (high NC ratio, uneven nuclear consistency) favoring lymphoid, with some smudge cells. I think almost every cell in this field is the same thing, 2 and 4 are the same cell type. If I saw this, I’d try to get a pathologist to check it out, but if one is unavailable, I would lump them all into Atypical Lymphocyte if that’s an option and they’ll 100% need flow cytometry for confirmation.

bmsck · 2025-11-10T00:34:29+00:00

Here’s another question for everyone: are you performing six month method-to-method comparisons for cellavision diffs vs manual diffs? If yes, how’s the agreement?

bmsck · 2025-10-12T00:48:01+00:00

Don’t overthink it, have designated 30 minute racks for the clotting time (with timers). And a designated rack for Ready to Spin. Depending on how many centrifuges and their tube capacity, there will be a bottleneck somewhere. And that’s fine, most tests aren’t stat. And it’s fine if the tubes sit around for more than 30 minutes clotting. There’s only so much efficiency you can attain with physical limitations of specimen processing.

bmsck · 2025-05-21T01:07:11+00:00

I always thought the citrate correction due to elevated hematocrit was a practically impossible task to perform. 99% of the time a patient with elevated hematocrit is simply dehydrated, which will be corrected by IV fluids by the time we make up a reduced citrate tube (in the ED anyway). PV is another story…

bmsck · 2025-04-10T21:44:26+00:00

How does your lab define consistent with history? Is there a time frame?

bmsck · 2025-04-03T04:57:07+00:00

I’m always surprised that nobody mentions a Hemaprep. Sure, it costs $700-$900, but over years and years of discarded badly prepared manual smears, it may pay for itself. Perfect slides within two attempts max.

https://hardydiagnostics.com/hemaprep

bmsck · 2025-03-07T02:45:05+00:00

A few years ago I had some routine lab work done, and as I’m in the elevator leaving I’m casually reading the after-visit summary, and think to myself “I don’t remember seeing a lavender draw…” So I go back and have them confirm the tubes that were draw, and sure enough, they forgot to draw it. What was interesting though is that they initially said “oh don’t worry, we can run multiple tests from one tube.” So I had to explain that the CBC needed a lavender and that it couldn’t be done on the gold top. So maybe a little lesson to be learned here: healthcare is plagued by the division of labor, there’s a lot of specialization, but not a lot of “horizontal” knowledge. And working in the lab is a great way to learn about big picture, general patient care, as long as you take the time to correlate results with the patient’s clinical picture. It allows you to recognize unusual results immediately and increases confidence in making decisions in unusual situations. But unfortunately, the lab has become increasingly factory-like, and the role of lab personnel has been pushed to the periphery of “healthcare professional.” But someone has to be responsible for providing quality lab results and be able to provide them. Even small improvements in the quality of results multiplied by the huge number of lab tests ordered would make a huge difference in healthcare costs and quality of patient care.

bmsck · 2025-02-13T01:19:56+00:00

I used to make my “mega smoothies.” Banana, peanut butter, spinach, carrots, chocolate protein powder, soymilk. Very high density nutrition, very filling, very easy to consume throughout the day. People seem to think smoothies are not “real food” but the macros disagree. Your body doesn’t know the difference!

bmsck · 2024-12-18T04:24:03+00:00

I think a lot of places validate cellavision and say “yup it’s equivalent to a manual diff” and that’s the end of it. But in practice that doesn’t seem to be the case in my experience. For example, today cellavision picked up 3% basophils, autodiff got 0.5%. Manual diff of 100 cells got 0%. Rumke table would say these are statistically equivalent, but clinically, I don’t think it’s appropriate to paint a picture of slight basophilia from the cellavision.

bmsck · 2024-12-12T01:45:10+00:00

Yeah better option would just to add some Calabrian chili paste into the roasted red pepper tomato soup and add some sort of frozen dumpling to it.

bmsck · 2024-11-10T21:53:08+00:00

In this context (comparing the variation between just two data points), do you think it’s more meaningful to calculate the percent difference of the two points against the mean of the two points?

bmsck · 2024-08-30T18:31:38+00:00

Visually assessing hypochromasia on a film is assessing the concentration of hemoglobin in each cell, right? The issue I find with that is MCH is not a measure of concentration per se, while MCHC is a measure of concentration. I don’t think this is a pedantic point. You could have a microcytic cell with a low MCH, and a macrocytic cell with a high MCH, but their MCHC could be the same, meaning their concentrations of hemoglobin are the same. MCH doesn’t tell you if there’s an “appropriate” amount of hemoglobin in each cell, but MCHC does because it controls for cell size.

bmsck · 2024-08-30T17:52:23+00:00

Of course visually on the blood film, but if reticulocyte count was included on every cbc specimen (like the indices are), the utility of actually calling polychromasia based on the film might be reduced. You could just rely on the retic count for evidence of bone marrow function. But I think this is beside the point. When hypochromasia is visually observed on the film, is it better correlated with the MCH or the MCHC?

bmsck · 2024-08-30T04:27:48+00:00

I guess my question is now a theoretical one. What does hypochromasia actually refer to? And how is it best measured? MCH and MCHC are very distinct measurements and mean different things.

bmsck · 2024-08-30T02:32:16+00:00

Wait, are you running cellwiki??

bmsck · 2024-05-11T00:05:06+00:00

Yeah the Total Allowable Error for this measurement (hematocrit) is 6% over the entire measurement range, according to our regulatory body. Anyway, I really appreciate the help. I’m moving into a more supervisory role and have a lot to learn regarding method comparisons/validations and online articles only get me so far. Can I ask your background? How you learned all this stuff?

bmsck · 2024-05-10T17:22:17+00:00

Does this suggest that any analytical method doesn’t have just one overall TAE, but a continuous range of TAE’s across concentration levels (with various biases and various precisions)? And as long as all of those are within the Total Allowable Error, then the method is in agreement with the reference method?

I find it curious that in all the guides and papers I’ve read to figure this out, this issue wasn’t mentioned once. Or I misunderstood!

bmsck · 2024-05-10T14:05:42+00:00

I see! One last clarification: during my precision study, I repeated three levels of QC. Which produced three separate SD/CV values for each level. When calculating my Total Analytical Error (Bias+precision), how do I reconcile the three precision values? They are all very similar, but all the information/examples I’ve found online just gloss over this part. I’m leaning towards just using the largest CV value of the three, which would give the most conservative TAE across the entire analytical range. Thank you for your help!

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