How important is histology?

[Doctor J]

originally stated by amoryblaine "histo is the 2nd most useless topic for the USMLE (embryo being #1). You can destroy step1 w/o ever having reviewed histo. You can honor every 3rd year clerkship w/o knowing anything about histo."

I agree with this statement wholeheartedly.

Most strict histology is kind of an artifact, a bit of medical tradition that many schools are moving away from as it becomes less and less useful to most medical practice. The study of pathology does not absolutely require knowledge of histology except perhaps as a mental image to jog your memory. In that respect it can be useful.
That said, Pathologists absolutely have to be crack histology experts and are also experts at pathology (which should go without saying but this thread has shown some touchy nerves). I don't think the mastery of histology is required for the mastery of pathology in other fields, however.

To answer the OP, I'll let you know in a few days how many histology questions I got on my step. My guess is there will be very, very few.

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[Haemulon]

Wow, a lot of heated debate here. For what its worth, I look at this from a much more basic perspective. Of course there are many things about medical school that seem archaic or inefficient. Perhaps the content of and manner in which many courses are taught is a big part of it. That being said, it seems intuitive to me that everyone should get a good general foundation across the basic sciences, including histology. There is much to even gross anatomy, for instance, that many physicians may not need in practice. Yet most everyone would agree that every physician should have at least received the original foundation. I view microanatomy (histology) in the same way. It gives everyone a general foundation in tissue structure and function and can really help to integrate general molecular and cell bio in the process (depending on how it is taught). I do not object to learning extra or perhaps less usefull material as part of a larger package with the goal of giving everyone a common baseline.

Whether we will ever need to be able to identify histo structures in practice, I don't know. Does it really matter? Even if we never do use it, the fundamentals will be there and could only help in our general understanding and command of the principles of medicine and disease (in the broad sense).

On the other hand, while I do see the value in looking at slides and being able to pick out normal structure, I must confess that there are much more efficient ways to get the info across ( ie with digitized images that we can flip through, sort, label and use for self quizing, etc....) Some schools go this route, others rely on doing it the old school way. With all of the other demands on our time, I am all for being more efficient and leaving the scopes for lab practicals (or eliminating them all together). Let us learn more quickly via archived images.

As an aside, I'd like to say that I do understand the arguments for using scopes, such as appreciating the 3-D qualities of the micro architecture, learning to use the equipment, being able to fine focus and visualize through different planes, ect.... I just feel like for the purposes of general histo, good quality computer images are the way to go. We need to learn the basics.

 

[Doctor J]

To answer the OP, I'll let you know in a few days how many histology questions I got on my step. My guess is there will be very, very few.

I was completely right in my prediction. I counted 6 questions with histology as a component, and I think all of them could have been answered without even looking at the pretty pictures.

There were many more that -described- histological findings.

 

[osli]

I think I had around ten questions that were pure histology (no path). Of those, most described the histology; I think four required you to answer based on the picture only.

In contrast, I had one embryo question that I can recall. So at least on my test, histo was 1000% more highly represented than embryo. Of course, everyone's test is different, and I would expect someone else to have exactly the opposite experience.

I do know one thing... I'm glad I studied histo, because I would not have wanted to spot the USMLE ten easyish questions.

 

[45408]

Actually, I'm with Jeebus on this. A good visual knowledge of histo is going to be important for pathology (the subject). And isn't path a pretty big one on the boards?

My step 1 had less path than I thought it would, and even less histo. Super low yield for me.

 

[shreypete]

I completely agree with Haemulon, certain things we learned in anatomy also didn't seem all that important but nevertheless these the main objective of these subjects (especially histology) is to sort of build your fundamentals and also gave a very basic introduction to the subjects you'll be taking in the future. I learned a lot of physiology and biochemistry in histology which I think will be useful to me next year.

Although of course, looking at it form a more practical perspective, that's for the Board exams and stuff, I guess it's not all that important at all.