Thursday, March 26, 2015

What is Pathology?

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 cytopathologyhematopathology, and histopathology. Pathology often is a main component in diagnosis and treatment of cancer and other potentially deadly diseases. 

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