Created by Yee Kwang Chien, medical student at the University of Tasmania
The home page is still being constructed
This page is dedicated to those who spend all their time in the hospital, learning signs and symptoms without knowing why, those who memorise all the patient and achieve fantastic results without knowing the pathology or medicine, those who memorise all the slide under the microscopy without knowing what to look for, those who lie in order to get what they want and those who see medicine as competitive rather than co-operative and sacrifice others for their own benefit.
This is the message for you: IT IS TIME FOR YOU TO START AND LEARN TO BECOME A MEDICAL STUDENT AND TO BECOME A HUMAN!!
Being a medical student at the end of 20th century is very hard, there is so much to study. The volumes of journals nearly double every five years and knowledge in all fields is expanding at an ever-increasing speed. In my medical school, pathology and medicine are thought from third year onwards. A lot of students find it hard to cope with the amount of workload placed on them. In my opinion, the reason is they see the two subjects as two separate subjects that they need to get through rather than looking for a link between them. This page is intended to introduce the idea of integration and correlation between the two subjects. The author of this page is a fourth year medical student, currently doing a research project. Due to the limited amount of knowledge, there must be some mistakes and hopefully, the readers will be kind enough to e-mail him through the address provided for him to correct the mistakes and learn from them.
The study of pathology consists of four main areas, aetiology, pathogenesis, pathology and complication. Aetiology deals with the cause of the disease. As a medical student, it is very difficult to remember the aetiology of all diseases. Hence, it might be helpful to remember a list of possible aetiological headings, which can be used each time to list out the aetiologies. The list that I commonly use consists of two major headings: congenital and acquired. Under congenital, we have genetic, developmental, inborn and under acquired, we have infectious, occupational, iatrogenic, inflammatory, nutritional, chemical, hormanal, environmental, neoplasm, radiation and physical causes. From these causes, there is a process which leads to the final disease status and the description of the process is known as pathogenesis. Studying of pathology is not complete without looking at the tissue both grossly and microscopically. Lastly, from these disease, we need to understand the functional complication that may arise.
Clinical medicine looks at the clinical signs and symptoms by taking history and examination. Then certain investigations are ordered to confirm the diagnosis. After that, a management plan is design to either treat the condition or to control the condition. In order for this process to occur, clinical medicine also requires the knowledge from a few other fields, including epidemiology, aetiology and pathophysiology. Often, the epidemiology and aetiology will help clinicians to establish the diagnosis and the pathophysiology of it will help to outline the management plan.
You may like to ask these two subjects seem to be separate and there is not even a remote chance that they are connected! Well, they are! Pathology is not only important in making diagnosis and deciding the stage of the disease, it is also very important in management and understanding of the disease process. The pathological knowledge of the gross and microscopical changes allow you to visualise the functional impairment, which causes the sign and symptoms. Furthermore, by knowing the pathogenesis of the disease and the natural history of the disease, the management is not hard to establish. It might be hard to imagine how that can be helpful. But, by looking through the few examples that I put on the next section, hopefully, that will help with establishing the correlation.
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While every effort has been made to acertain that information contained here is current and accurate, readers are asked to check with appropriate product information whenever a drug is used. The author will hold no responsibility in any way for any consequence resulting from the usage of the information contained in this page.
Arteritis 
My University. Have a look
