What
is Pathology?
Dr.
Naseh Nawabi MD, Los Angeles, CA
Pathology is a branch of medicine that covers all
manner of identifying and diagnosing disease. Pathologists have a broad range
of responsibilities and avenues of study, but most pathologists work to
diagnose disease through analysis of tissue, cell, and bodily fluid samples.
When a doctor is attempting to diagnose and treat a patient, they send samples
to a pathologist to be analyzed for diagnosis.
Once a pathologist has
identified a disease, they work to properly analyze the sample and ensuing
consequences on the patient. There are four major components of disease that a
pathologist will study: the cause or “etiology”, mechanisms of development
“pathogenesis”, structural alterations of cells “morphologic”, and the
consequences of changes or “clinical manifestations”.
Pathologists play an
important role in medical diagnosis, without their expertise in analyzing the
disease, doctors and researchers cannot accurately figure out how to treat
patients. The branch of pathology can be further divided into subcategories and
specialties such as cytopathology, hematopathology,
and histopathology. Pathology
often is a main component in diagnosis and treatment of cancer and other
potentially deadly diseases.
