(•_•) ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■)
[Puts my sunglasses on dramatically]
[Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who plays]
Okay-okay, I couldn’t resist that. How many times have you just wanted a CSI-style joke on here? No? Just me? That’s fine…
Hello again everybody! Welcome back! Last month I talked a bit about “Just Culture,” a sort of bridge between the values we tout as clinical leaders in our laboratories and the medical culture’s evolving and value-informed paradigm shift. There was a little in there about the lessons paralleled in LMU and the benefits of interdisciplinary teamwork. This month, on the subject of interdisciplinary collaboration, I’d like to talk about our colleagues who often are secluded or in more remote areas in our hospitals, offices, and academic centers. Not here to stereotype; I’m talking about our friends in forensic pathology!
Before I get there, let me go back a bit. I’ve already written several times about the stereotypes that surround our field of lab medicine and there are two times when that is glaringly present: when you’re a medical student or when you’re in forensics. I got the chance to meet someone who falls into both categories.
I’ve just finished up my OB/GYN rotation. But before my last day, I went to the lab at our hospital and followed up on some pending biopsy results. Okay, I can’t lie to you guys: they wanted me to see if I could rush “my lab friends” to expedite the process of fixing, setting, cutting, staining, and reading/reporting—because that’s possible. So, I went to the lab and had a pleasant chat with the staff explaining the situation and they were happy to help. While I was there, however, I happened to see another short white coat (ironically from my same school) who was helping some lab personnel with some grossing. Turns out she wants to match into a pathology residency—just like me—and specifically was interested in forensic path, a field which I don’t know much about. After talking more, I asked if she’d like to share some information. Here’s my conversation with Kyla Jorgenson, a 3rd year medical student at AUC-SOM from Toronto, Canada:
I get lots of hassle when I say I want to become a pathologist. People often ask me, “what’s your back up choice” or “don’t you like patients?” It can be a challenge. What’s your experience been like?
You want to do autopsies, so you want to be a mortician, right? Not quite. Many times, I’ve been faced with blank stares when I say I want to be a forensic pathologist. Other times I get the other end of the spectrum, that’s so cool! Clearly, they’ve seen a few crime-shows and think that I’ll get to go to crime scenes in stiletto high heeled shoes with a song by The Who playing in the background as I arrive. Even today when talking with a dermatopathologist I got a, “well when you realize that hanging out with dead bodies every day isn’t the greatest, you might consider surg path.” Then after hearing my experience as an autopsy assistant and that I’m sure this is what I want to do it was the resigned sigh signalling that I was a lost cause already.
A “lost cause,” that’s frustrating. A lot of specialities rag on other ones, it seems to be part of the culture of medicine—hopefully not forever, but still can’t we all just get along?
So, my background leading to pathology involved me working for several years between college, graduate school, and medical school; in hospitals of various sizes. I have personal experiences in these fields and sort of feel “at home” when I’m dealing with hematopathology, transfusion medicine, cell therapy—that sort of thing. What piqued your interest in forensics?
I started my undergraduate degree in forensic biology at the University of Toronto in the fall of 2008 just as a major review of pediatric forensic pathology in Ontario was being released. After numerous issues came to light, the inquiry looked at policies, procedures, practices, accountability and oversight mechanisms, quality control measures and institutional arrangements within the field in Ontario from 1981 to 2001. Ontario Court of Appeal’s Honourable Justice Stephen T. Goudge developed 169 recommendations on how pediatric forensic pathology in Ontario needed to address and correct its systemic failings to restore public confidence.
(Read more about these inquiries here: https://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/inquiries/goudge/index.html)
After studying the cases that prompted the inquiry and its recommendations in class, what left the greatest impression was the importance of having medicolegal autopsies performed by those trained in not just pathology, but specifically, forensic pathology. What I took away from the cases of accidental deaths falsely attributed as homicides due to lack of experience on behalf of the pathologist and other such issues, is that forensic pathology isn’t something to be dabbled in. While our patients are no longer alive, there are lives that can be affected by the work we do. In Ontario, false convictions not only stemmed from “junk science” but also from inadequacies in the training of pathologists working in a forensic capacity and also a general shortage of forensic pathologists.
Seems like a lot of us (of the few of us) who enter medical school knowing we want to go into pathology have to sort of wait their turn, as it were, collecting experiences which help make us competitive for residency matching—what keeps your “commitment algorithm” going?
Since discovering that forensic medicine is a career path as a high school student, I’ve geared my education towards training in forensics. First my undergraduate degree and then a side trip for my master’s degree in Forensic Death Scene Investigation and a job as a pathology technician at the Medical Examiner’s office on my way to medical school. I have in each step along the way, confirmed that both medicine and forensics fascinate me. Scroll through my Netflix account and you’ll find crime dramas (with the British shows being my favourite) or my podcast app filled with true crime shows; I am enraptured using science to figure out what happened.
Sidebar: at this point Kyla showed me a first-author published piece in the Journal of Forensic Sciences from 2017 that talked about law enforcement-involved firearm related deaths in Oklahoma, where she worked at the time. Basically, it showed through metadata analysis that gun-related deaths were on the rise. Not just over time, but number of times being shot. Remember when we talked about pathology’s role in the #StayInYourLane/#ThisIsOurLane discussion? Well which pathology speciality do you think works with this stuff directly? Chemistry? Cytology? Last time I checked GSWs don’t get screened for lead poisoning and you can’t FNA a bullet. Forensic pathology has often been tasked with seeing trends in morbidity and mortality and translating that to effective social and public health change: think seatbelts, stents, and maybe someday gun-related legislation changes.
I was interested when I shadowed at the Cook County ME’s office a few years ago—I saw some cool things. I also remember learning a lot from the first real autopsy I saw in a hospital, ultimately it seems like a totally different field that maybe gets underappreciated even within the pathology umbrella. AP/CP residents have to do a certain number of autopsies to graduate, but the attitude I’ve noticed around the topic is a “necessary evil” and most are working towards not having to do that. So let me ask you definitively, why forensic pathology?
Medicine is science being applied to find out what happened in the body and how we can change or manipulate those variables to diagnose, prevent, treat and manage disease. Each diagnosis is solving a crime occurring within the cells in the body, if you will. In forensic medicine, not only do you get to do all that but add in the crime solving element and you get to be “Dr. Nancy Drew.” While medicolegal systems are different all over the US and Canada, chances are that as a forensic pathologist you won’t only be working on your stereotypical “forensics” cases, the gunshot wounds, stab wounds and other nefarious causes of deaths many associate with that term. You could get the generic, “cause of death atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, manner of death natural,” for a large proportion of cases.
It’s not glamorous, you could spend your day with a two-week-old decomposing decedent that has a pulsating maggot mass devouring its torso or documenting 51 stab wounds or signing out your cases after reviewing your histology and toxicology reports or testifying on a homicide case you worked on. But for me, those all sound like pretty interesting ways to spend the day, sign me up. As a pathology technician assisting with the autopsies and external exams, I was never required to think about what was happening in the body, but I wanted to understand it all. Now as I progress through medical school and look towards residency and fellowship, I eagerly await the chance to perform my first autopsy as a physician, to put all the knowledge and experience I’ve gained towards helping move Ontario and forensic pathology forward.
I’d like to thank Kyla for her time in talking with me and her willingness to share her insights with all of you. I wish her all the best of luck as she continues through her training with electives and core rotations both in the UK and state-side. If you have any questions to relay to her, please feel free to comment below and I will forward appropriately. And as always, don’t forget to share with your colleagues across every discipline!
Thanks for reading, I’ll see you next time where I’ll be writing from the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, conducting a formal rotation in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology! Don’t miss it, I’ll have lots to share while learning at one of the nation’s top institutions!
Until next time!
–Constantine E. Kanakis MSc, MLS (ASCP)CM graduated from Loyola University Chicago with a BS in Molecular Biology and Bioethics and then Rush University with an MS in Medical Laboratory Science. He is currently a medical student actively involved in public health and laboratory medicine, conducting clinicals at Bronx-Care Hospital Center in New York City.
Lablogatory 