24: What is Forensic Pathology? Dr. Melinek Shares Her Story
Today's guest is Dr. Judy Melinek, a New York Times bestselling author and a Forensic Pathologist based in California. She documented her journey through her fellowship training in her book, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner.
One important thing to note is that Pathology isn't actually a required rotation in medical school, one reason that it's not commonly under the radar of most medical students. Listen to our discussion about the field of Forensic Pathology and how you can explore if this is something you're interested in.
[01:20] Working as a Forensic PathologistDr. Melinek does some academic work. She is currently affiliated with UC Davis as a Research Associate. Forensic Science students from their Master's and undergraduate programs shadow her but she isn't presently on staff at any academic institution.
Most forensic pathology jobs tend to be for government agencies, either a coroner/medical examiner's office. Any academic affiliation usually tends to be in the clinical instructor's status teaching residents and medical students.
Dr. Melinek did her fellowship in Forensic Pathology from 2001 to 2002 and then she did another fellowship in Neuropathology from 2002 to 2003. In 2001, she started working as a Forensic Pathologist because even during fellowship, she got paid doing autopsies being part of the coroner/medical examiner's office, specifically working for the New York City Medical Examiner.
[02:49] The Road to Forensic PathologyDr. Melinek only figured out she wanted to become a forensic pathologist until later since she wasn't exposed to it as a specialty in medical school. She stresses this is something we need to further discuss and explore because it's a real failing in our medical education that pathology is relegated to second year academic discourse but there is no required pathology rotation in medical school like there is for internal medicine or general surgery. It's only something people have to discover on their own.
Dr. Melinek got exposed to Pathology in second year medical school just like all medical students and then they offered this post-sophomore fellowship in pathology, which is an extra year you take in medical school between second and third year and work in the pathology department. You're just like a resident and you get paid but you're not just a resident or MD yet. But it's an opportunity for them to expose people to pathology in a more hands-on level.
She basically did this post-sophomore fellowship in Pathology having wanted to take a gap year between college and med school. But she got in off the waiting list and she was afraid she would lose her spot if she decided to defer. So she found this as an opportunity to take a break but still be doing medicine and working at the same hospital she was training at. Dr. Melinek describes it as a great experience having been exposed to multiple different rotations in pathology including the blood bank, autopsy, and surgical pathology. Also during that time, she was allowed to do research and she actually decided to do research with the liver transplant team. That's when she fell in love with surgery and decided she wanted to be a surgeon. But everybody in Pathology convinced her to be a pathologist.
Upon finishing medical school, Dr. Melinek matched in Surgery and went to a General Surgery residency and lasted for only six months until she collapsed from exhaustion and decided she wanted to be a Pathologist realizing it was a better fit for her personally and professionally. Because of her impressive work, the pathology department at the UCLA Medical School had saved her a spot outside the match so when she quit surgery, they gave her a spot to start in July. Dr. Melinek claims it was the best decision she ever made.
[05:40] Post-Sophomore Pathology Fellowship and DemandThis type of fellowship is sponsored through ACGME and the American Board of Pathology. The organizations that accredit pathology residency programs allow a year of pathology while you're still in medical school and it accounts towards your residency. This existed when Dr. Melinek was still in medical school. (Upon checking on the internet, some institutions that offer this program today include UCLA, Stanford, Duke, and West Virginia University. Check with the institution you’re interested in getting into if they offer such program.)
Of the six post-sophomore fellows they had during her time, three ended up in Pathology. Dr. Melinek says this program helps people who are interested in the field to pre-select and also it cements their interest. It's an easy way to get people interested in it.
She adds that Pathology is easy to recruit for once you're exposed to it. It's such a wonderful field. It's so intellectually stimulating. People are really nice. It has pretty decent work hours and not as physically or emotionally grueling as some of the other specialties can be, especially surgery. Dr. Melinek thinks it's easy to recruit but the problem is it's not a required rotation in medical school so it's not in the radar of a lot of students. It's not something they think about.
As a result, there are only about 700 or so board-certified forensic pathologists practicing in the United States, which is half of what they need for the demand. She sees job openings that are open for months and even years because there is just not enough forensic pathologists to fill. Dr. Melinek therefore highly recommends the field for medical students to consider in terms of job security and opportunities.
[07:51] Surgery versus Forensic PathologyDr. Melinek got drawn to surgery because of it's hands-on nature and you get to fix things, as a practical person that she is. However, she wasn't attracted to the field's lifestyle and found it to be too exhausting. She was on call every other night and she had to watch her attending physicians cycle through multiple marriages and being there late at night for long hours, sacrificing their family times and their own mental health in exchange for the career, which she thought as unnecessary. She believes it's a financial burden and a cultural problem in the field and that you really don't need to train surgeons this way as there are more reasonable programs in general surgery.
What Dr. Melinek likes about pathology is the reasonable hours. She basically was drawn to it primarily because of that exposure she had in medical school though at that time she didn't have the passion for it that she had for surgery. She felt disconnected from patients and that she wasn't being a real doctor. People do criticize that which of course Dr. Melinek thinks is such a crap. Anyway, she felt disconnected from patient care and from the action and excitement that surgery had until she did her forensic pathology rotation at the New York City Medical Examiner's Office.
[09:22] The Work of a Forensic PathologistWhen she was a resident in Pathology, they did rotations in different fields and she went to the New York ME's office for a one-month rotation. There she fell in love with the field, being able to go to crime scenes, testify in court, and interact with police officers and with family members of those who had died. She finally got that variety and excitement she was missing.
Dr. Melinek wants people to understand that this is the pathology work. You're not just in a lab doing autopsies and looking at microscopic slides all day. You do a lot of field work, going out to scenes as well as a lot of work interacting with a lot of families on the phone. You testify in court at least once a month on average for her. You also interact with lawyers as you try to explain the science to them. Basically, you're built in as an academic and a teacher even though you're not officially in an academic environment. Dr. Melinek finds herself educating family members about the disease process that killed their loved ones over the phone. She finds herself teaching juries about science so that they can make a good decision about guilt or innocence about civil liability. She considers herself a teacher, just not in formal academic setting.
[10:55] Traits of a Good Forensic PathologistYou have to be curious and to be the kind of person who digs more into something when it doesn't make sense or it sets off your BS meter. A lot of medical specialties are not going to have all the answers and you have to take the best pass forward given the limitations of your time and financial resources. But in forensics, you have time. They have an expression in forensics that is kind of tongue in cheek, "They're still be dead tomorrow." On the plus side, it means you can work on a case the next day and not have to rush it. The other aspect of that is you can put this off 24 hours and think about it. You can look up another article or contact your colleagues and wait. There's no rush in those cases for you to come up with conclusion. What's more important is for it to be rigorous, accurate, and defensible.
[12:12] A Day in the Life of a Forensic PathologistDr. Melinek currently works three days a week at the Alameda County Sheriff/Coroner's Office and sometimes fill in on Mondays or Tuesdays if other people are sick or on vacation.
Her typical day at work is waking up at 6:00 to 6:30 am and gets a text from her boss informing her of the number of cases she has. She gets her kids off to school and then driver to the office which is a 40-minute commute for her. She gets in at around 8:40 am. She reviews the cases and paperwork generated by death investigators from the office who are deputy coroners and they're the ones who went out to the scene and collected the dead body. They have a clinical summary about what happened to the deceased, whether they were ill or drug abusing, or when they were last seen alive, when and how they were found, the condition of the body. All of these are in the report. They review the reports and then split it up among themselves. In her current office, there is one chief forensic pathologist and four assistants who stagger their schedule so there's usually two or three of them on a given time. From 9am to noon, they go in the morgue doing the autopsies. A typical autopsy takes about an hour or an hour and a half at the most if it's a homicide case. Some cases can take multiple days where she would do two hours one day and two or three hours another day or splitting them up over several days. But majority of the cases can be done in an hour to an hour and a half.
In the afternoon, she does paperwork, field phone calls, talk to lawyers, and also does her consult work. In addition to working for the coroner's office, she is also an independent forensic consultant so she can get hired usually by attorneys and sometimes family members to do a second autopsy or give an opinion in a case of wrongful death, whether civil or criminal cases. She looks at paperwork and reports and gives them her opinion. Sometimes, she gets called to testify for court.
[15:00] Percentage of CasesFor the bodies that she's doing an autopsy for, their causes of death are a mix. About 10-20% of her cases are homicides, which is disproportionate compared to what you see on television. The remaining 80% is a mixture of natural deaths, people who are elderly or young people with natural disease but haven't seen a doctor. They either died at home or en route to the hospital or in the street and they don't know why they died. Then when she does the autopsy, she finds natural diseases, heart disease being the most common as well as lung disease from smoking and complications of obesity on the natural death spectrum. Another equal percentage of cases comprise accidents which are predominantly motor vehicle fatalities and overdoses. They can make it to the hospital and survive for a period of time but they'll still come to their office because any case that is sudden, unnatural, or violent gets evaluated by the medical examiner. A smaller percentage would be suicides. Dr. Melinek reckons it's 20% homicides, 80% split up between natural, accidents, and suicide.
[16:35] Call Schedule and Crime ScenesIn her current position as a contract pathologist, she doesn't take calls. The only person on call is the chief forensic pathologist and she estimates that he gets called out to scenes maybe once or twice a month at the most. In the previous job she held at the San Francisco Medical Examiner's Office, there were four of them who would split up calls. So they'd be on call for one week at a time, which means you just get called out at night to crime scenes and she gets called out about once a month. It would be unusual for her to called out twice in the same week, and it's usually once a week.
Most people may think that when you're being called out in a crime scene, they'd imagine CSI, Bones, or Dr. House. In reality, Dr. Melinek says it depends on the case. When she was In San Francisco, they get called out just for homicide, which are clear cut cases or those where they suspected a homicide. If she went out to a scene, it would have already been cordoned off by the police with a lot of police activity and the medical examiner would be the one would come in underneath the line. First, you have to sign in so they have a log of who comes in and out of the scene. You have to have your personal protective gear, gloves, booties, depending on the condition of the scene. The first thing they do when they get there is get basic information from the police officers at the scene about what happened, how was the body found, were shots fired, what did people hear or see, what are witnesses telling you. Then they go over to the body. They don't move it until after it's been photographed. A lot of time on the scene is typically spent waiting for the crime scene unit photographers to do their work and document everything with photography and video. And only then can they move the body, take a look, and assess the injuries so they can give the homicide detectives at the scene an idea of what they're seeing on the body and some leads about things they can question witnesses about.
When asked about how she gets used to seeing these crime scenes, Dr. Melinek explains that all of medicine is a desensitization process. She remembers the first time she came in and got introduced to a cadaver on her first year of medical school and she freaked out. She knew she would be dissecting a cadaver because that was part of medical school and she's always been fascinated in human anatomy and how the body works. She says there's always a gross out factor but you still find yourself getting drawn to it. You actually get desensitized over the course of medical school, the first time you see a delivery or an autopsy or you do surgery and you see somebody's chest wide open with a heart beating. It's shocking yet you're trained sufficiently to do your job and follow the lead of the people with you in terms of learning how to cope with the stresses of the job.
Dr. Melinek finds that forensic pathology is actually less stressful than taking care of living patients for which she has done both. When taking care of patients, there are demands of the patients and families which can be unreasonable. They're in pain and suffering. They're not happy. So she found it more stressful given that and it was harder for her to separate from that and forget about it once she gets home than it is for her dealing with the horrible things she sees on the daily basis because she knows they're no longer suffering and out of their misery. She deals with this by thinking it's her job to make sense of this chaos and give some closure to the family and answers to the legal system that can help repair the mess that a few seconds of impulsivity created.
[21:05] Postgraduate Training for SubspecsAfter finishing medical school, the minimum is three years of anatomic pathology residency and one year of forensic pathology fellowships. That's a total of four years of postgraduate training before you can go and work at a medical examiner/coroner's office.
Dr. Melinek did surgery first and then when she went to pathology, she didn't know she wanted to do forensic so she did both four years of anatomic and clinical pathology. Anatomic and clinical pathology combined make you more marketable for working in a hospital setting. Clinical pathology involves laboratory medicine so it involves managing the laboratories at the hospital, the blood bank, the hematology lab, the toxicology lab, the microbiology lab. It involves learning how the test work, the assays work, and how to supervise and manage the equipment and the technologists who work there.
So instead of the minimum three, Dr. Melinek did four years of residency and then two years of fellowship, one in forensic pathology and the other one is forensic neuropathology, which was a program that her fellowship placed at the New York City Office.
A typical neuropathology involves working in a hospital setting where you're diagnosing tumors and doing surgical pathology. It's a two-year program where one year is spent examining brains and doing surgical pathology while the other year is spent doing research in order to be board-certified. Instead, Dr. Melinek just did one year of examining brains in a forensic setting. It's both brains and spinal cord taken out of the autopsy in cases where the death is sudden or violent, sometimes they have gunshot wounds, sometimes history of seizure disorder, sometimes without any history and the pathologist out of prudence, saves the brain and spinal cord for a more thorough analysis by a neuropathologist. They would slice the brain and spinal cords and then look them under the microscope to make a diagnosis of things like Alzheimer's disease or chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) which is injury caused by repeated concussions.
[23:41] Competitiveness and Testing the WatersDr. Melinek says it's not competitive to become a forensic pathologist, in fact, it's easier compared to other specialties and subspecialties. She adds that a lot of pathology programs don't fill. This is actually surprising to her because it's a great, fun job, especially now that she's hitting middle age and a lot of her friends and colleagues that have gone into other specialties are hitting burnout but she's not tired at all. She actually has colleagues in their early 80's and are still practicing because they love what they do. Everyday is something new. Everyday is challenging.
If this is something you're interested in or you just want to test the waters, Dr. Melinek recommends that you do well in your histology and pathology coursework in first and second year of medical school. Then start talking to your teachers, most of them are in the pathology department at your hospital. Find out about doing rotations with them and see if you can shadow them. Go down to the surgical pathology division and find out when they have their rounds or when they have their teaching cases. Sometimes they have resident conferences where they sit around the microscope and they look at slides. They always have extra room for medical students. She further...
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