Are pathologists becoming mere technicians?

How many hours each workday do you spend interacting with a computer screen instead of a person? As a pathologist, if you are signing out digital slides, flow cytometry or molecular diagnostic tests, interacting with a computer screen instead of a human being probably takes up most of your workday. Looking at glass slides is also usually without interpersonal interaction. Now ask yourself: of the diseases you are diagnosing, how much knowledge of their clinical manifestations (such as signs and symptoms) are you using to diagnose them? You do need years of training in morphology and the technical aspects of pathology to make the diagnoses that you make. The technical knowledge that you need of immunohistochemical, flow cytometric and other types of patterns continues to grow by leaps and bounds. For example, years ago, a lung biopsy showing adenocarcinoma would be signed out using only routine hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining, but now it increasingly requires immunostaining to confirm that it is lung primary and molecular testing for mutations conferring sensitivity to targeted therapy.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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