Helen — thank you, and I’m sorry to hear about your friends. The biopsy-type question is exactly the right one to be asking now, because the answer determines what they’re actually being treated for.

Two distinctions worth knowing:

Tissue biopsy vs. liquid biopsy. A tissue biopsy (core needle, surgical excision) examines actual cells under a…

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Weogo — your instinct is sharper than the textbook answer. Helen’s right that ELISA and Western blot are distinct from PCR. But there’s a deeper question underneath what you’re asking.

The Western blot doesn’t actually measure antibodies. It measures binding events between your blood serum and proteins of a specific molecular weight, separated on…

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Helen:

The question in the title is the right one. The honest answer is both, depending on what produced the label.

Three lab tests do most of the trapping in modern infectious-disease diagnosis: the ELISA, the Western blot, and PCR. The industry says they detect proteins, antibodies, and viral genetic material respectively. None of them does…

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