When will I be able to go home? Does my child have an infection? Will he be all right? Does she have cancer? These are some of the questions that bombard your mind when children and other loved ones are hospitalized, and you are not sure what is troubling them or how long they will have to be hospitalized. To answer these very important questions will usually take more than the examinations your doctor performs in the office or at the hospital bedside. Almost always, the answers to these questions can be found in the pathology laboratory. And that is the area of responsibility of a specialized doctor - the pathologist.

In a way you might consider pathologists as disease detectives, for that is just what they do. They take the evidence, obtained through blood and urine samples, throat cultures, tissue samples and biopsies (samples) of all organs and other body tissue removed from patients by surgery, analyze it under a microscope and through hundreds of highly complex tests arrive at some basic conclusions about the patient's health or illness. These evaluations or analyses as to what the problem is are not guesswork, but are based on verifiable evidence.

There are more than 2,000 different tests that can be performed in a pathology laboratory for various reasons. Often they are done to screen for treatable or preventable diseases before you develop the symptoms of the disease. Such tests include the pap test to detect cancer in women, prostate blood tests for men to check whether the prostate gland is free of cancer, and cholesterol levels of both men and women to see if the arteries leading to the heart are blocked. Often a high cholesterol reading can indicate a strong possibility that the arteries leading to the heart are blocked with plaque and are therefore preventing the blood from flowing into the heart as it should. Such blockage can lead to the symptoms of angina (pains associated with heart disease) or a possible heart attack. Other tests are done to make a clear-cut diagnosis, often when you exhibit the symptoms of certain diseases, such as a cardiac profile to see what damage if any you have sustained from a heart attack.

Another very important test is done through biopsy. Here a minute portion of tissue removed from your body (an organ or a part of your body such as the breast or your chest) is sent to the clinical laboratory, as the pathology lab is often called, where the pathologists can examine it under a microscope to see if it is malignant (cancerous) or not. This is something that is required of all tissue removed during surgery in all hospitals. If the biopsy or sample of your tissue should show a malignant tumor, the pathologist can tell your doctor exactly what type of cancer is present so that the doctor and the medical team (pathologist, cancer specialist and others involved) can decide on how best to treat the cancer. So in a way you could consider the pathologist as the doctor's doctor. A specialist to whom your doctor can turn for support in any case where there is uncertainty as to a patient's disease or health in general.

Pathologists are medical doctors, who have been trained in this specialty. Currently, there are about 12,000 board-certified pathologists practicing for the most part in hospitals. An estimated 75 percent work in hospitals, but additional thousands work in medical schools and in private laboratories, in government sponsored research facilities on various levels, and in the research laboratories of drug companies. In general, pathologists apply scientific principles to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of medical diagnosis and treatment. They contribute vastly to the knowledge that your doctor and others need to do their work.