LETTER
Pathologists Are Doctors
Neil Blumberg;
Michael Albert; and
Keith Krabill
1 April 1993 | Volume 118 Issue 7 | Page 575
TO THE EDITOR:
We were both moved and appalled by Dr. Inoshita's piece. He found pathology to be "suffocating, sterile". Alas, perhaps the fault is in Dr. Inoshita, not in his stars. Dr. Inoshita has finally "become a doctor". By implication, pathologists, including those who get out of bed in the middle of the night to perform an emergency therapeutic leukapheresis or a frozen section on a patient are not doctors. We hope Dr. Inoshita can muster more sensitivity for and insight into his patients than he shows his colleagues. And what of those benighted internists who for various reasons have chosen to practice laboratory rather than clinical medicine? Are they some sort of "undoctor," to be struck off the roles of the American College of Physicians.
We are happy that Dr. Inoshita has found fulfillment but would be more enthusiastic if we were certain that he had been educated to the important lesson that medicine is now a team sport. As in soccer, the strikers ought not to run down the duties of the fullbacks. We believe that medicine has many roles for physicians of differing talents, needs, and temperaments. Dr. Inoshita should be ashamed of his implicit contempt for physicians who have taken alternate paths.
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