Shingles – Diagnosis

Transcript

Your doctor will ask you if you ever had chickenpox in the past. And if you haven’t, your doctor will ask you if you have been in contact with someone with chickenpox or shingles. The doctor will look at the rash. He can make the shingles diagnosis just from seeing the rash itself, without needing to know if you have any other symptoms. However, if you don’t have a rash, your doctor might send you for either a blood test or blister test. The blood test results will confirm the presence or absence of varicella zoster virus, while the blister test checks for the virus itself. The clinical diagnosis of shingles does not usually require testing, but rather is made by the history and examination of the rash.