Question: what is pathology

Hayley Pincott answered on 11 Jun 2018:

Anything starting with path- means disease and anything ending in -ology means to study. So basically pathology is the study of disease and we do this looking at and testing body fluids like blood and urine, tissue, organs and the whole body. In my department of Oral Pathology we are a specialist department within histology (histo- tissue, again -ology to study, histology is to study tissue) so we get biopsies of abnormal tissue and this goes through various processes in the lab and we make a slide for the pathologist to look at. The pathologist then diagnose and report back to other doctors and between them all as a team they decide what the best way to treat the patient. There are 19 different departments in pathology and they include biochemistry (where we test the chemicals in your blood), blood bank (here we give blood out to really ill people), microbiology (they do an amazing job trying to tell doctors which medicine is best to try to stop antimicrobial resistance which is where certain bugs don’t get ‘killed off’ by antibiotics). Also last year the NHS treated 1 million people in 36hrs, out of those million patients pathology was involved in 700,000. We’re quite important but people don’t really know we exist so I’m kind of on a mission to make people aware of us.