It's called "going to medical school"

Some skills are so basic and fundamental to the practice of medicine that it would be literally impossible for a medical student to graduate from medical school without possessing them. Needless to say, one of these skills is learning how to interpret basic labs such as a CBC and BMP/CMP. Seriously, good fucking luck trying to pass the USMLE/COMLEX without being able to recognize abnormal laboratory values. Graduating from medical school and receiving a medical degree without being able to recognize abnormal labs is like going to a car dealership and being sold a car without wheels. It just doesn't happen - not to a new attending physician, not to a resident, and not even to a second-year medical student. But, as the above post from an apparently newly minted midlevel nurse practitioner by the name of Mona McDowell shows, graduating from NP school (especially at Florida Southern College) a few points short of a full GCS is pretty par for the course, to the detriment of NP McDowell's patients at Central Florida Health Care in Winter Haven, Florida.

We can only imagine a patient encounter going like this:

A CBC (complete blood count) and a comprehensive metabolic profile (CMP) can reveal a myriad of potential disease processes, e.g. anemia, infection, electrolyte imbalances, renal failure, to name a few things. But how can you consider these things and recognize pathology when you haven't even learned what "abnormal" is? Can you imagine an attending physician, let alone a resident, having to look things up every time they encountered a CBC or CMP? Indeed, this level of incompetence would literally be unfathomable for a physician. We weep for NP McDowell's patients.