Helping medical students to learn pathology more effectively.

Context: Teaching methods in pathology for undergraduate medical students are not effective.

Aims: To document measures that can be adopted by individual teachers that can excite the interest, participation of the students and help them learn pathology in a clinical reasoning context.

Settings And Design: Medical students in a large international medical school with class sizes of 700-900 were taught the pathology course in a period of sixteen weeks for two cohorts of students each year over a period of twenty years.

Concept map as an adjunct tool to teach pathology.

Context: Concept maps (CMs) were tested for their effectiveness in teaching pathology in a conceptual manner.

Aims: To correlate the quality of CMs drawn by students with their performance on tests involving clinical problem-solving.

Subjects And Methods: Students were taught "how, why, and so what" about CMs at the start of the course.

Benign Bone-Forming Tumors: Approach to Diagnosis and Current Understanding of Pathogenesis.

The diagnosis of benign bone-forming tumors continues to be based on the traditional approach to bone tumor diagnosis using knowledge of the spectrum of histopathologic features seen in these tumors in combination with clinical and radiological correlation. This review emphasizes the pathologic features and the clinical and radiological features that the surgical pathologist must have a working understanding of to make an accurate diagnosis and avoid confusion with other lesions, particularly osteosarcoma. New and persistent challenges facing the practicing pathologist and our current understanding of the cytogenetic and molecular abnormalities involved in the pathogenesis of these tumors are discussed.

How can the postgraduate training program in pathology departments in India be improved?

There exists a wide variation in the competence of the postgraduate residents trained in pathology in different institutions across India. This results in strong disparities in the clinical diagnostic skills, teaching skills, research capabilities and the managerial skills of the graduates. The end users of this training, namely the community, clinicians and health care institutions would benefit from a more uniform and better trained pathologist.