In Indonesia, the laboratory can be described as a place occupied by three things: machines, analysts, and clinical pathologists. Machines are contraptions doing all the automated laboratory examinations, analysts are people operating the machines and performing the manual examinations, while clinical pathologists are medical doctors who click on the computer mouse. This unfunny role of clinical pathologists in the world of medicine has been a subject of ridicule and mockery. The machines are perfect and the analysts are experts, so why does the world of medicine require an extra person to authorize something that doesn’t need to be authorized? Even if some kind of authorization is needed, isn’t it best be done by the clinicians who treat and know the patients well, thus enabling them to directly compare the laboratory results with the real conditions?
It’s no wonder then to have a clinical pathologist’s protest in a seminar painfully dismissed by an internist. The protest was the fact that most clinicians do not include the patient’s diagnosis in the laboratory form, making it hard for clinical pathologists to produce a clinical interpretation. The dismissal was that a clinical pathologist’s interpretation was actually not needed at all. “We will make the interpretation ourselves,” said the internist sharply. Ouch... It seemed like there’s no use to have a clinical pathologist around.
Such notions proved to be personally troublesome, especially when I realized I had already enrolled in a school to be one. Bigger questions came up in mind. What are clinical pathologists really? What are they supposed to be doing? Is it true that they do not have a role at all in the world of medicine? And if they do, must they first be medical doctors?
I pondered as I went along. After about two years living in the environment, here are a couple of things I’ve noted from teachers, friends, and my own experience.
