These threads are a bit silly and frustrating. Being in Canada, I've learned a little about the history of pathology up here. Apparently in the not distant past salaries were awful and very few Canadian went into path, so there were tons of FMGs practicing path here. At some point some pretty serious patient care errors occurred, there was a stink, salaries went way up, and now most programs fill most of their spots with Canadians. I wonder if something similar may ultimately have to happen in the US for the medical field to recognize the importance of pathologists...
This is why my perspective is very critical of pathology. Its a huge part of medicine, the biggest part of diagnosis, and still the field cannot get its act together to show its true worth, nor evolve to provide the most value.
It was less than 10 years ago that pathologists were paid less than family doctors. Naturally, and logically, no Canadian graduates went into the field.
Since the field is invisible, and is seen to be "lab", "automatic" and "not really medicine", the health authorities were fine just getting some foreign docs, with no attention paid to their skill, qualifications, or ethics.
Of course, this move eventually resulted in a barrage of critical medical errors.
Pathologists then had their incomes increased drastically, but there are still issues with autonomy; namely they are mostly salaried hospital employees, which is still a hugely undesirable outcome for most medical students interested in diagnostic fields.
Again, despite the income hike, path is still the least popular field in CaRMS. It still has to half fill with IMGs, and a scary proportion of these IMGs are frankly incompetent.
All this being said, students interested in path are probably also interested in rads, and given the above(money, autonomy, a good reputation, a strong lobby, and the fact that your resident peers are up to standards), there is no reason other than backing up, or extreme love of the subject matter, that a student should ever choose path over rads.
