Toxicology

Most hospital laboratories will perform fairly simple toxicology studies such as urine drug screens and blood alcohol analysis. Positive drug screens performed on urine should almost always be confirmed on the patient’s blood. There can be false positive and false negative scenarios that can affect urine drug screening procedures and the pathologist and clinician taking care of the patient should be aware of these potential pitfalls. Almost all hospital-based laboratories do not perform detailed forensic toxicology testing and those analyses are usually left to dedicated forensic toxicology laboratories.