CLINICAL PATHOLOGY

Terminology description

Clinical pathology is a branch of science that deals with the diagnosis of disease with the help of body fluid analysis. These body fluids that are used for analysis can be urine and tissues. Such study is referred as clinical pathology in United Kingdom, Commonwealth countries, Italy, United States and Portugal , as Laboratory medicine in Poland, Romania, Eastern Europe and Germany, as Clinical analysis in Spain, as medical biology or clinical biology in Austria, West Africa, North Africa, Belgium, Netherlands and France. This clinical pathology discipline incorporates other disciplines like hematology, chemistry, biology, microbiology, molecular biology and molecular pathology. Clinical pathologists may be specialized in either of the following pathology subfields. It is much more like residential medical service and has no correlation with biomedical service. It is not related to medicine in any way.

Licensing Clinical pathologist

American Board of Pathology recognizes and certifies Clinical pathologist in United States. It is because some countries does not require specialization certificate whereas countries like United States require recognition and certification by specialized boards. Clinical pathologists shall practice either of the following

• Hematopathology
• Clinical chemistry or Chemical pathology
• Clinical microbiology
• Cytogenetics
• Blood banking for transfusion medicine
• Molecular genetics pathology

In other countries it includes the following subspecialty

• Immuno pathology
• Semen analysis
• Sperm bank
• Assisted reproductive technology

Clinical pathology specialization

Each and every subspecialty discipline of clinical pathology has its own value of standards that were set forth by authorities. For instance clinical chemistry is a branch of clinical pathology which deals mainly with body fluids. It is also referred as chemical pathology. Chemical laboratory are more concerned with testing of hormone functionality, immune system function, drug action and function or pharmacology.

Other instance of clinical pathology is hematology. Here clinical pathologists are concerned more with blood bank test. Before proper utilization of blood from blood bank, it is categorized and analyzed by series of steps. However, blood transfusion requires no categorization and hence some preservatives are added.

Another instance of clinical pathology is medical microbiology or clinical microbiology. Clinical microbiology deals with microorganism study. They work in correlation with immunologists for better understanding of infectious organism pathway. Most of the clinical pathology studies have common characteristics of anatomic pathology. Clinical pathology is interdisciplinary approach of patients.

Questions:

• What is clinical pathology?
• What are interdisciplinary field of clinical pathology?
• How clinical pathology helps in identification of pathogenic disease?