Rolfe
22nd July 2005, 10:48 AM
Randi did a neat job showing up the technical fakery in those two blood films. However, the same general effect could easily be produced without any need for electronic fakery.
When you make a blood film, the result will vary a lot depending on technique. The aim is to get a monolayer of cells, with no or little overlap, but still to have the cells quite close together. The trick is to get the size of the drop of blood and the speed of the spreading just right so as to achieve this, and the right size and speed will vary between samples. In particular, anaemic samples with relatively few red cells will need a bigger drop.
If you get it wrong and make much too thick a smear, the result will look much like the first of the two pictures. Except it will be more realistic (the cells won't show that "chaining" appearance), and there will be no electronic fakery to spot. If the smear is a bit too thin, it will look more like the second one (though actually, the second one is quite a good film). Indeed, you can often find a decent area on the edge of a smear which is actually much too thick for most of its surface, so you could quite easily get the two different effects just by photographing two areas of the same film.
So, bad marks to the fakers for using electronic methods when they could just have fudged it the old-fashioned way.
But even more of a jaw-dropper is the idea that it would be a good thing if your red cells were wide apart so that they can carry "nutrients" and oxygen more effectively.
News flash, quacks.
First, red cells don't carry nutrients, they only carry oxygen. That's all.
Second, the oxygen carrying capacity is directly related to the amount of haemoglobin you have in your blood.
Now, each red cell has a finite amount of haemoglobin in it. (The MCH, about 30pg per cell in man.) So if you want to carry oxygen more effectively, you need, guess what? More red cells. Not fewer.
I would have thought that everybody knows that you need to have a sufficient concentration of haemoglobin in your blood. "Low blood count" is a well-understood problem, even by non-medical people. Because of the way haemoglobin is carried in the blood, in little 30pg packets called red cells, low haemoglobin equals "low blood count" equals low red cell count equals fewer red cells which will therefore be further apart.
We specialists refer to this conditions as ANAEMIA.
These fakers are actually telling you how being anaemic must be good for you, at least in their bizarro looking-glass land of alternative haematology.
Rolfe.
When you make a blood film, the result will vary a lot depending on technique. The aim is to get a monolayer of cells, with no or little overlap, but still to have the cells quite close together. The trick is to get the size of the drop of blood and the speed of the spreading just right so as to achieve this, and the right size and speed will vary between samples. In particular, anaemic samples with relatively few red cells will need a bigger drop.
If you get it wrong and make much too thick a smear, the result will look much like the first of the two pictures. Except it will be more realistic (the cells won't show that "chaining" appearance), and there will be no electronic fakery to spot. If the smear is a bit too thin, it will look more like the second one (though actually, the second one is quite a good film). Indeed, you can often find a decent area on the edge of a smear which is actually much too thick for most of its surface, so you could quite easily get the two different effects just by photographing two areas of the same film.
So, bad marks to the fakers for using electronic methods when they could just have fudged it the old-fashioned way.
But even more of a jaw-dropper is the idea that it would be a good thing if your red cells were wide apart so that they can carry "nutrients" and oxygen more effectively.
News flash, quacks.
First, red cells don't carry nutrients, they only carry oxygen. That's all.
Second, the oxygen carrying capacity is directly related to the amount of haemoglobin you have in your blood.
Now, each red cell has a finite amount of haemoglobin in it. (The MCH, about 30pg per cell in man.) So if you want to carry oxygen more effectively, you need, guess what? More red cells. Not fewer.
I would have thought that everybody knows that you need to have a sufficient concentration of haemoglobin in your blood. "Low blood count" is a well-understood problem, even by non-medical people. Because of the way haemoglobin is carried in the blood, in little 30pg packets called red cells, low haemoglobin equals "low blood count" equals low red cell count equals fewer red cells which will therefore be further apart.
We specialists refer to this conditions as ANAEMIA.
These fakers are actually telling you how being anaemic must be good for you, at least in their bizarro looking-glass land of alternative haematology.
Rolfe.