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- CAP Author Chat - Surgical Pathology Review's Dr. Daniel Mais
There's a gap in the instructional texts for surgical pathology, such that residents preparing for pathology board exams or even practicing pathologists who need a refresher. In this CAPcast, Daniel Mais, MD, FCAP, discusses his recently published book, Surgical Pathology Review, which is focused on addressing these gaps.
Details
Julie McDowell:
There's a gap in the instructional text for surgical pathology such that residents preparing for pathology board exams, or even practicing pathologists who need a refresher or reference text, lacks sufficient information. In this CAPcast interview, Dr. Daniel Mais discusses his recently published book, Surgical Pathology Review, which is focused on addressing these gaps. Dr. Mais, first, congratulations on the release of your book. What passion prompted you to write this book?
Dr. Daniel Mais:
Thank you, Julie. I think the passion that prompted me to write this book is simply a passion for resident education, sort of informed by my experience with residents and how bewildering the quantity of information can be.
Julie McDowell:
You write in the preface that Surgical Pathology Review is intended to fill a gap. What are some of the topics addressed in this book that has not been addressed adequately in other sources?
Dr. Daniel Mais:
The textbooks that are available for pathology residents to use generally fall into two main categories. There's textbooks, sort of the prototypic example would be Robbins, that are written with an audience of medical students in mind. Those textbooks cover fundamental pathophysiology and cellular level details about diseases. On the other hand, there's a lot of really excellent textbooks that are aimed at practicing pathologists and particularly practicing pathologists who are trying to figure out diagnoses to individual cases.
Both of those types of textbooks sort of miss the middle ground that would be ideal for an audience of residents, which is an audience that sort of gets medical student-level information. They've already got that, but they're not quite looking for a how to book yet on pathology. They're trying to fill in a lot of information, a lot of associations with diseases that they are learning about. So there are many bits of information that residents need to have that are actually not in either of those two types of books or are present in some of those types of books, but are so diluted by the other information they're trying to convey that it's just simply not an efficient way to learn. So that's sort of the gap we were trying to fill.
Julie McDowell:
So what about residents preparing for board exams and for their transition to work in a laboratory? Are they likely to get the most use out of this book?
Dr. Daniel Mais:
Yes, I think so. I think that the residents, particularly as they're preparing for conferences during residency, preparing for sign out during residency, and particularly preparing for in-service exams or certification exams, are going to find the highest level of value in this book. I guess also down the road pathologists who are looking at at recertification might also find it valuable as a refresher to remind themselves of this sort of genre of knowledge that they might have forgotten.
Julie McDowell:
Can you talk a little bit about some of the features of Surgical Pathology Review that will especially interest readers?
Dr. Daniel Mais:
If it could be described as a feature, probably the most compelling feature would be simply brevity in that we try to boil down each individual topic to its most essential facts. But in addition to that, I think some attractive features are the large number of really excellent color photographs that are in the book meant to illustrate typical examples of the entities that are covered. And then, I mean, I guess it's also hard to overstate the importance of the price of the book, which is, I think, relatively affordable for most residents.
Julie McDowell:
Finally, Dr. Mais, do you have any other thoughts about your book that you'd like to share?
Dr. Daniel Mais:
Yeah, I mean, I think we thought it was important to have multiple authors each with subspecialty expertise, write the book. These are all people who are working with residents on a day-to-day basis and sort of, I think, understand the challenges and the gaps that we encounter in resident knowledge. But each of those authors had their work sort of streamlined into the outline that we wanted for each section of the book so that the ultimate product is pretty uniform in terms of what you get depth of knowledge and breadth of knowledge. So we tried really hard to make it a solid product in that way.
Julie McDowell:
Well, thank you, Dr. Mais, for discussing your book. Surgical Pathology Review is now available from the CAP. Please visit estore.cap.org and search for either the book title or PUB130. That's P-U-B130.
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