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Invited Commentary
Health Care Reform
October 2014

Folate Testing: Time to Retire Your VCR

Author Affiliations
  • 1Department of Laboratory Medicine, University of California, San Francisco
  • 2Clinical Chemistry Laboratory, San Francisco General Hospital, San Francisco, California
JAMA Intern Med. 2014;174(10):1697-1698. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2014.3272

I was coming home from a long work week at the hospital and thought of stopping by the video store to rent a copy of the latest Hollywood blockbuster video. I called my wife from my office telephone to tell her I’d be late. I wasn’t sure where the store was, but I had a map in my car and found directions. The store was in a strip mall. In the parking lot, there was a drive-through film developing store that advertised return of prints in less than 1 hour. Great! I’d drop off my film, go to the video store, and, if I had some extra time, I’d peruse the record store for Pearl Jam’s latest album. When I got home, the kids were thrilled that I had brought home a recently released Disney movie on VHS. They popped it into the VCR and were amused for the next 90 minutes. However, when my wife and I looked at the pictures from our latest vacation, we were disappointed that several of the shots were blurry and my son’s eyes were closed in many of the photographs. Most of those pictures went into the trash.

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