CAP TODAY Pathology/Laboratory Medicine/Laboratory Management
The visible pathologist
January 2023—The CAP president’s column, “The visible pathologist” (CAP TODAY, November 2022), struck a chord that has been reverberating through our specialty for many years when a medical student who expressed an interest in pathology was asked, “Why don’t you want to be a real doctor?” You put it in terms of “disappearing” as judged by our role in the case of patients.
The angst that pathology is experiencing at this moment is one of ultimate disappearance as in extinction. Extinction can be the result of an immediate catastrophic event or a slower process with the loss of the ability to adapt to an evolving environment. However, the ability to reproduce through natural selection is the key element in the maintenance of the species, which in this case is the pathologist. The process for many of us began as medical students and our direct contact with pathologists and their residents in the lecture hall and student laboratory. Unfortunately, the contemporary integrated curriculum has largely eliminated or severely curtailed that interaction between pathologist and medical student. The pathologist in the curriculum today is now a vignette in a secondary role if that. How are the future physicians, today’s medical students, to conceptualize the role of the pathologist in their practice with such limited contact? Yes, I know that we can create opportunities through outreach efforts in high school, a medical student “shadow,” or interest group.
As a “hospital” specialty, many of us are no longer a physical presence in the hospital where we once interacted on a personal daily basis with our clinical colleagues. The latter circumstance was highlighted in CAP TODAY in the article, “Pathology hospitalists in place at UMich” (April 2022). In the story, Jeffrey Myers, MD, related some of the self-inflicted wounds to our specialty. Are such efforts a gesture in an attempt to recover what has already been lost? I do not believe that the COVID-19 pandemic is sufficient to restore pathology on any sustained basis.
These are reflections of a pathologist who has practiced for more than 50 years and who made the right choice of specialty for himself and never looked back from that decision, one that was fostered by a succession of pathologist-mentors.