difference btwn heme/im and heme/pth

[danip]

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i have a question about residency programs. I've been looking into heme/onc and i was on frieda and i saw that there are programs that are heme/im and programs that are heme/pth, so what's the difference. i thought you had to do a path residency to go into hematology and an im residency to go into oncology. I guess i'm wrong though; can anyone explain this to me? thanx so much 🙂 ;
almost a 4th yr

 

[DarksideAllstar]

The way that I understand it is that you do IM (or Peds if you want to see kids) then do a 3 year fellowship that generally encompasses Hematology and Oncology (I think that there are a few straight Hem fellowships, but they are rare). You do this if you want to treat these patients in the clinic (ie you are their cancer or blood doctor). The Pathologists do a pathology residency and can then do a hematopathology fellowship to specialize (you are not the patients cancer doc, but you typically diagnose it).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I am pretty sure thats how it works.

 

[yaah]

Yup - they are two mutually exclusive tracks. Doing a hemepath fellowship doesn't allow you to see patients in house and give chemo. You can generally do bone marrow biopsies, and there is the rare hemepath doc who sees patients occasionally - generally someone who has a specific rare interest and does it as part of research and their expertise. But your time is spent reviewing bone marrow, lymph node, and peripheral smear slides (to diagnose cancer or other diseases) and interpreting other lab results like flow cytometry. You do a hemepath fellowship out of path residency - as far as I know you can't get a hemepath fellowship coming from a different field.

Heme-onc you do after medicine residency, and again I don't think you can do this unless you have done medicine residency. Surgeons have surgical oncology, another fellowship, if they choose.

Amazing that your school hasn't informed you about this...I know some schools marginalize path and act as though diagnoses are easy to make, just snip the tissue out and put it in a magic box and voila, but sheesh.