That was a 6 week rotation lol. And I hated it.
I got curious, so I looked it up and found this:
https://www.gloshospitals.nhs.uk/ou...s-and-investigations/pregnancy-test-beta-hcg/
I don't think it's that common therefore it's not something we covered in basic sciences, but it seems to have some merit. I know bHCG can be elevated in certain cancers, even in guys, which the article explains too. I remember seeing a story several years back where a young guy took his girlfriend's pregnancy test and it came back positive and that's how he found out he had ball cancer. What a way to find out.
Going back to the link, it sounds like they're saying elevated RBC/WBC/nitrites can cause the false positive but that doesn't make sense to me since bHCG is a hormone and the rest are cells or byproducts and I'm not sure how they can fuck with a reading to give a false positive. Obscure bHCG and cause a false negative? I can believe that. But make make bHCG more prominent in a test? I don't know.
As I said, I learned fuck-all in that rotation and the doctor didn't take me to the hospital once in that time. He was on vacation for two or three of those weeks when I first started so I basically passed time looking at ghetto cooter with the physician assistant and seeing if I could correctly guess the patient's age by the number of rings in her vagina, like a tree.