From the President’s Desk

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As private citizens, we should all care that there are enough qualified professionals available to perform scientific autopsies that may be needed to explain sudden unexpected deaths or even to inform our criminal justice system. As citizens of a representative democracy, we want as much objective information available to the criminal justice system as possible, and that is what forensic pathologists are trained to deliver.

And from a professional perspective, clinical and anatomic pathologists practicing in any number of different clinical settings should very much care about the fate of our colleagues in forensic pathology. We have seen this in other areas in medicine already: If there aren’t enough experts to perform important work, there will be a push to fill that gap some other way—often by reducing the qualifications needed to do it. We run the risk of having people with insufficient training assigned to perform forensic pathologist work. It is yet another threat to the scope of practice in pathology.

This kind of work goes well beyond findings related to any single death. Forensic pathologists have a huge role to play in public health. During pandemics, their expertise is critical to identifying trends about how people are dying. Their analyses during the COVID-19 pandemic about what the virus was doing to the bodies of its victims were essential in helping other medical professionals learn how to care for patients more effectively to prevent them from dying. Forensic pathologists also inform other big issues, such as shining a spotlight on the recent resurgence of syphilis in the U.S., identifying the drug overdose epidemic, or framing firearm-related deaths as a public health crisis.

How can we help? One of the most important things we can do is to help raise awareness about the forensic pathology career path among up-and-coming physicians. Even though forensic pathologists are so popular on TV shows, many people do not understand that these experts are physicians. Pathologists in academia in particular can help through their efforts as pipeline champions, introducing medical students to the field and getting them excited about the impact they can have as forensic pathologists.

Dr. Volk welcomes communication from CAP members. Write to her at president@cap.org.