Originally Posted by Enkidu

Hi, I think you've misunderstood me. My interest is in pathology, and my intent in this thread was to get a sense of how oncologists view pathologists. Specifically I wanted to know if oncologists are mostly fulfilled by their patient interaction or whether they sometimes envy being able to diagnose and characterize cancer on a morphologic/molecular level.

My impression from this thread was that oncologists don't consider that pathologists necessarily diagnose cancer any more than they do, and that pathology can't even be compared to oncology because pathologists don't have patient contact. I guess that this surprised me.

After you took issue with my characterization of pathology as "diagnosing" cancer, I switched my usage to "definitive" or "final" diagnosis of cancer. I guess I'm not really sure how to specify the role of pathology any more clearly.