does path get boring after awhile?

[Chrismander]

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Hey all--path seems so cool, with all the learning of the all the weird diseases and seeing cool pretty pictures under the microscope. I'm going to do a rotation in it during my 4th year to see how it fits me. But I'm wondering, do any of you feel like it gets boring after you've been doing it awhile? Does the intellectual challenge start to wear off at some point, and become mindless repetition and pattern recognition? if you're at a small community hospital in private practice, do you still get to see a decent range of interesting stuff, or does it tend to be the same sample types / diseases over and over again?
Thanks for any help--sorry the question is so vague, but I won't get to do a path rotation for awhile yet. 🙁

 

[yaah]

Every case is different, not to be trite. Sure, you start seeing a lot of the same stuff over and over again, but you also never know what is going to be on the next case. You see something you haven't seen before very frequently. To me, it would have far more variety and interest than writing admit orders for the diabetic with cellulitis for the billionth time.

There is a risk, in any job you do, that it will become routine and less interesting. But there is enough variety in path so that you can deal with that if you choose, or you can take a job where you see similar types of specimens over and over. As I said though, not every adenoma looks the same, and not every gastritis looks the same.

Personally I think the intellectual challenge gets harder after you start to know what you are looking at. It isn't as simple as it may seem at first. You start to notice more subtleties and formulate better differentials, etc.

 

[LADoc00]

Luckily a year or so post-fellowship, the day to day cases get fairly easy. In terms of boring, there are mountains of stuff you need to learn especially in private practice like contract law, medical billing, insurance regulation, employment law and accounting. No, it is not boring, but yes it can be overwhelming.

 

[PathOne]

One of the nice things about Pathology isn't that there's no boring stuff. But that you can dispense with the boring stuff awfully quickly, once you gain experience. In clinical medicine, you can accomplish procedures marginally more efficient as you become more proficient, but you still have to spend time talking to patients, prepping and performing the procedure, etc.

In Pathology, you can look at a slide for a few seconds, and if you know what you're looking at, you can dictate your dx and move on to the next slide, which might be a real headache which can take an hour or more, but which you'd learn something new from.

However, a natural ability will of course help you greatly. Most important for a pathologist is probably pattern recognition. If you can remember that you've seen similar morphology before (and can remember what it was) you'd be helping yourself a lot. Conversely, you REALLY don't want to have vision or color-blindness issues. That could essentially destroy your career...

As previously posted, Path is probably the most intellectual among the medical specialities.

 

[CameronFrye]

One of the nice things about Pathology isn't that there's no boring stuff. But that you can dispense with the boring stuff awfully quickly, once you gain experience. In clinical medicine, you can accomplish procedures marginally more efficient as you become more proficient, but you still have to spend time talking to patients, prepping and performing the procedure, etc.

In Pathology, you can look at a slide for a few seconds, and if you know what you're looking at, you can dictate your dx and move on to the next slide, which might be a real headache which can take an hour or more, but which you'd learn something new from.

However, a natural ability will of course help you greatly. Most important for a pathologist is probably pattern recognition. If you can remember that you've seen similar morphology before (and can remember what it was) you'd be helping yourself a lot. Conversely, you REALLY don't want to have vision or color-blindness issues. That could essentially destroy your career...

As previously posted, Path is probably the most intellectual among the medical specialities.

I agree completely. That's a big reason I decided to go into pathology. You see a lot more of the cool stuff you've spent years learning about. First of all, there's a selection bias: if something is being sent to path, then there's a good chance that something is there: it may be benign, but there's usually something there.

Also, you just see a much larger volume of cases. As Pathone mentioned, if you see something simple and boring, you just plow right on to the next case.

Oh, you have a boring tubular adenoma? It takes you three seconds to dictate and then you move on. Oh, you have a patient with a runny nose? It's still going to take 15 minutes to take care of. Oh, you have a boring patient with gallstones? It's still going to take an hour to do the surgery.

I saw more interesting cases during my first day of residency than I did during my entire 3rd year of med school.

 

[SaltySqueegee]

I agree completely. That's a big reason I decided to go into pathology. You see a lot more of the cool stuff you've spent years learning about. First of all, there's a selection bias: if something is being sent to path, then there's a good chance that something is there: it may be benign, but there's usually something there.

Also, you just see a much larger volume of cases. As Pathone mentioned, if you see something simple and boring, you just plow right on to the next case.

Oh, you have a boring tubular adenoma? It takes you three seconds to dictate and then you move on. Oh, you have a patient with a runny nose? It's still going to take 15 minutes to take care of. Oh, you have a boring patient with gallstones? It's still going to take an hour to do the surgery.

I saw more interesting cases during my first day of residency than I did during my entire 3rd year of med school.

All I have to say is cool!

 

[DrBloodmoney]

The best thing about path is that eventually you probably have something to do with all of the great cases that come through your hospital. And you get to tell the clinicians what is wrong with their patients.