Can you have a regular practice and be a Forensic Pathologist?

[MichaelWBarker]

Can one be a Forensic Pathologist and also have their own practice to see patients for general medical issues?

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[Brian Pavlovitz]

Hmmmm. I guess it's possible, but I think it would take going through:

1) a "general" residency (family practice, internal med) at 3 years,

2) a pathology residency (perhaps just AP at 3 years),

3) a forensic pathology fellowship (just 1 year?).

I'm pretty sure you can't just go into a forensic fellowship without doing a complete path residency--anyone else here know if this is correct?

 

[yaah]

If you are not worried about being caught, going to jail, societal isolation, the whole death penalty thing, anyone can moonlight as a forensic pathologist. I will take you on as a patient, but when you die, I get to have first dibs on doing your autopsy to see if I was right about that heart condition and the prostate tumor. That ought to go over well with patients. They would flock to you.

Seriously, I think that this is not a very realistic query. Seeing patients is a full time job. Forensics is a full time job. You can't really hope to be an expert on both and practice in each. I think once you start exploring the fields you will find which area is more appealing.

You can, however, moonlight as an autopsy diener (the one who opens the body and assists the pathologist). That might give you a lot of what you are looking for, Dr Lecter, while still being able to see patients in an office practice. Most dieners are not physicians, but then again that is probably because most physicians do not want to be dieners, as they pay is probably not so great. Go for it though. Moonlight.

 

[Gut Shot]

Many counties in the US still use the coroner system for dealing with medicolegal deaths, and coroners are either elected or appointed. Therefore, no medical training whatsoever is necessary. I have heard that in the old days the coroner in more rural areas was sometimes selected based on his willingness to cart bodies around in his truck/station wagon. The autopsies would naturally have to be farmed out to trained forensic pathologists.

More and more localities have gone to the medical examiner system, however, in which everything is done by forensic pathologists.

As such, if you really want to be an internist and still get your hands into some crime scene action, you could theoretically become a coroner somewhere. Yaah's suggestion is probably a lot more viable, however.

Historical interlude: The coroner system was derived largely from the British system, with the word descending from the term "crowner." Crowners were charged with determining if suspicious deaths were the result of suicide vs. other cause. They did this because suicide was considered self-murder, which would result in the assets of the stiff being forfeit to the monarchy. I'm betting they would routinely have some wildly improbable "suicides" from time to time: Fifty eight stab wounds to the back? Suicide. Burned at the stake? Suicide. Tied to a tree and disemboweled? Clearly a suicide.

 

[joedogma]

Thanks for the history lesson havarti! I bet the coroners got a percentage of the assets too...

 

[Gut Shot]

Flogging is also a great incentive. Unless you're dealing with masochists, of course....

 

[Mindy]

Hello! You can become a medical examiner as a non-pathologist doctor. Though I was quite put-off when a medical examiner internist asked me when I had not completed an autopsy report as quickly as he would have liked: "so what do pathology residents do?"

Medical examiners and coroner's (ones that are not pathologists) hire pathologists to do autopsies.

Mindy