Microscope

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ZEISS

I cannot imagine what it is  like to practice medicine without a microscope. Boy does that date me. Our clinic ran a lab, that is before small clinical labs were virtually eliminated by regulation. From my experience with hospital labs, it is a good idea to look over your urine, gram stains and blood smears. OK, things are more efficient now. You don't have time to stick your nose in the lab. The computer-screen images everything you need including x-rays. Sure, if you are in the Mayo Clinic. What about rural health. Wherever you go for an outdoor lifestyle there won't be that kind of support.

Enter super-microscopy, a field not yet adapted for small office use but what potential. With a small library of fluorescent dyes, one could diagnose a wide array of infectious and parasitic diseases. Who knows, with weather change, we could be looking for malaria.  Some fluoroscopy techniques yield super-microscopy imaging with traditional light microscopes and filters. This is not a costly thing.

Traditional light microscopes with wave lengths of between 350 and 750 nm become blurry right at the cell wall or edge of microbes, 200 nm. With fluorescent dyes that respond to a much narrower range of wavelength the image sharpens up to a resolution around 20 nm. That tenfold improvement in resolution is a real big deal for clinical use.

Commercial interests will work away from that goal of clinical use, however, because large scale clinic use of fluro-microscopy would threaten the high profit margins of hospital and commercial laboratories' revenue stream.

I wouldn't hang my shingle without one.