Preparatory Activities Before Carrying Out Clinical Treatments For Hepatitis C

Before hepatitis C treatments begin in a clinical setting, there are three things that are usually done first. Doctors usually have to get some things out of the way first before they can fully get into gear and start with the treatment of their patients who are suffering from hepatitis C. There is a need to make sure that no mistake has been made in diagnosing the condition. It is worth noting that the medications used to treat hepatitis C are very potent and putting a patient who doesn't actually have the condition on such medications would be very wrong. Or it could be the opposite. The patient has hepatitis C and requires some potent medication. However, since it was diagnosed as something else, the patient may end up not getting the treatment or medication required. So the whole situation is very tricky, and to manage it, doctors normally do a number of tings, before starting patients on hepatitis C treatment courses.
The first thing that normally precedes the commencement of hepatitis C treatments in the clinical setting is the recording of the patient's history. Here, the patient would confide to the doctor about how he or she is feeling. Throughout all these, the doctor would take notes of everything shared to him. Based on this sharing, the doctor would weigh things and see if there is anything that points even vaguely to the possibilities of hepatitis C. If his suspicions warrant tests, he'd have them ordered. Hepatitis C symptoms are not what you'd call distinct or unique to the condition. That is why doctors often have trouble at this stage because the symptoms could be identified with various other conditions. Identifying the condition correctly would often require the doctor to look into even the remotest connections. Doctors would then normally suggest that their patients, once they've exhibited a certain permutation of symptoms that may or may not raise signals for hepatitis C, undergo further lab tests. 
Now the next thing that is often seen to take place before the start of any hepatitis C treatment is serology. Serology, or blood testing, would involve several stages. In the first stage, the idea is not to detect the hepatitis C virus per se. The body, in response to a hepatitis C attack, would produce antibodies to combat them. The purpose to the lab tests is to look for these antibodies. The presence of a significant amount of these antibodies is already proof enough that what they are dealing with is hepatitis C. Next, serology would now move on to trying to calculate the actual hepatitis C viral load in the body. 
It is also normal for doctors to have a biopsy conducted prior to starting any hepatitis C treatment. This is necessitated by the fact that hepatitis C can damage the liver. A biopsy would be conducted in order to find out if the liver has already been damaged by the hepatitis C condition. If it emerges that the disease has indeed messed up with the liver, a further effort is made to figure out the extent of the damage. Despite the risks posed by liver biopsy, they have to be trudged through, particularly if there are signs of liver cirrhosis.