My cohort is in the middle of a four-part class series called Pathology. It's exciting and interesting if you're into pictures of malformed tissues and details of aberrant cytokine patterns.
We have such packed schedules that I often try to eat lunch during Pathology lecture. Every time, though, I'm rudely reminded that the projected images can be disturbing. They're gross--sometimes stomach-wrenching gross--until I remember that these are people's bodies, and then, actually, it's heart-wrenching and sad.
I bring it up because this is an important, and I think affirming, distinction. It is the difference between thinking of disease states as being:
• pathology--the body doing something wrong, versus
• adaptive physiology--the body doing the best it can considering its setbacks and resources.
So when we see a slide of something gross like lung hepatization or aortic atherosclerosis, we're really just viewing the aftermath of the body's heart-wrenching struggle to make do. And heart-wrenching isn't more pleasant than stomach-wrenching, but at least I can eat.
We have such packed schedules that I often try to eat lunch during Pathology lecture. Every time, though, I'm rudely reminded that the projected images can be disturbing. They're gross--sometimes stomach-wrenching gross--until I remember that these are people's bodies, and then, actually, it's heart-wrenching and sad.
I bring it up because this is an important, and I think affirming, distinction. It is the difference between thinking of disease states as being:
• pathology--the body doing something wrong, versus
• adaptive physiology--the body doing the best it can considering its setbacks and resources.
So when we see a slide of something gross like lung hepatization or aortic atherosclerosis, we're really just viewing the aftermath of the body's heart-wrenching struggle to make do. And heart-wrenching isn't more pleasant than stomach-wrenching, but at least I can eat.
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