I am prescribed a stimulant medication for treatment of ADD. Apparently, one of the new standards of care at my clinic is to have periodic urinalysis tests for drugs of abuse when being prescribed controlled substances so that my prescriber can check that I don’t have any addictive processes working in me. I submitted my first sample for this the other day and got my results today. Unsurprisingly, it showed a positive result for amphetamines, and negative for everything else.
At the bottom of the test, it says that a spectrometry analysis they ran on my urine also showed evidence of acetaminophen, amphetamine, diphenhydramine, metformin, and ranitidine. None of those is especially surprising, as they’re all either medications I am prescribed or may have taken for symptoms I had in the previous 24 hours. I am curious, though, because that does not represent a sum total of all the medications I take.
So, are my following surmisings correct?
- The spectrometry is designed to confirm the results of the primary (presumably reagent-based) tests.
- An additional purpose of spectrometry is to specifically test for medications which are known to cause false-positive or otherwise oddball results.
- No one really cares that I’m taking Lipitor, because it has no known abuse potential or effect on the results that people do care about. As such, they don’t specifically look for it.
BTW, I am not looking for medical advice or ways to beat UAs here, so would appreciate if people would try to steer away from these hot-buttons.