Flu season comes around every year and no one likes to be sick, especially with the flu. If you’ve gotten the flu before you might even dread this time of year. Although influenza, also known as seasonal flu, may seem like a common cold at first, it’s not the same.

Say you’re having some strange symptoms that you don’t know the cause, so you visit your doctor to seek help and get some answers. Or maybe you’re visiting for a routine checkup, but some health concerns come up unexpectedly. In either scenario, your doctor may want to evaluate the situation further and have some testing done to figure out what’s going on inside your body that may be causing such symptoms.

Have you been to the doctor recently and needed blood work or urine testing done, or perhaps some other type of testing? There’s a common phrase you, as a patient, may hear doctors frequently say: “I’ll send it to the lab.” It being some sort of patient sample (urine, blood, etc.) that was taken for testing, and lab being the clinical laboratory where the sample is sent to be tested. If your new to medical testing and have never been through this before, you may be wondering what is a clinical laboratory? What do they do there and what kinds of tests are run at a clinical lab? What should I expect in this process?