W hat do the following scenarios have in common?

• Tension is running high for a patient’s family. In the operating room, a surgeon removes some tissue and rushes it to the lab for examination under a microscope to see if it is cancerous. The results will determine how the surgeon will proceed and will help inform the patient of the prognosis.
  
• Instead of the patient undergoing surgery, fluid and cells from a suspected tumor are removed through a hollow needle and biopsied.
  
• A suspicious death occurs and an autopsy is done to determine the cause of death. Another patient dies, and an autopsy is performed that helps the doctor assess the accuracy of diagnosis and effectiveness of treatment, information that can help in the treatment of future patients.
  
• Day in and day out, routine lab tests rule disease in or out, measure levels of glucose or cholesterol, and assess a patient’s response to infection or disease.
  
• In the lab, bacteria, viruses, fungi,and parasites are identified in order to determine the most effective treatment.

In all of the previous scenarios, there is a pathologist at work. “Within our specialty, the principles of the basic sciences are artfully applied to very real, often complex, patient problems,” observe doctors Joseph A. Prahlow and Daryl G. Vogel on the website of the College of American Pathologists.

Like much of medicine, in this age of rapidly advancing technology, pathology is hardly standing still. New and complex tests are making the pathologist’s work an important part of the diagnosis and treatment of more and more patients.

These are some of the many ways that pathologists work:

• Anatomic pathologists analyze the structural changes in tissues and cells, playing a central role in the diagnosis of surgically removed tissues.
  
• Clinical pathologists may oversee specialty laboratories and consult with patients’ physicians in many areas (for example, in hematology they draw bone marrow samples from patients, diagnose leukemias and lymphomas, and identify malarial and other parasites; in transfusion medicine they oversee blood banks and transfusion of organs).
  
• Molecular pathologists use new DNA and RNA technology to identify infectious agents, monitor therapies, and screen for genetic defects and inherited susceptibilities to disease.

Where do pathologists work? Most work in community hospitals. Others work in medical schools, doing basic or applied research, and may also teach and do diagnostic work in university hospitals. A great advantage of the field is that more than most other physicians, pathologists are the masters of their own schedule: rarely do they need to be called in at night. Salaries vary, but the median can be about $200,000.

What does it take? After medical school, pathologists must complete four to five years of residency and may pursue a number of subspecialties, such as forensic pathology, pediatric pathology, blood banking and transfusion medicine, among others.

You might have been under the impression that pathology is a less glamorous field than other medical subspecialties. If so, you’d better examine that idea under a microscope!

For more information on careers in pathology, go to the website of the American Society for Investigative Pathology at www.asip.org, and click on “Pathology as a Career in Medicine,” from which much of this information was drawn.

Article courtesy of www.careersandcolleges.com