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Dear AAPA Members,
Recently, the AAPA, working alongside an external marketing firm, updated and modernized our brand as certified pathologists’ assistants through the release of a new logo, booth, and marketing campaign. This new campaign, titled “It Pays to Know”, focuses on the role of certified pathologists’ assistants as experts in gross pathology, helping to set the gold standard for high quality patient care through our education, training, and knowledge. We continue with our “It Pays to Know” campaign by bringing you the latest installment in a series of social media posts developed to draw attention to our profession, both within and outside the field of Pathology. For your part, we ask that you share these posts in an effort to expand our reach in bringing greater awareness to our profession.
As we all know, a lot of information can be attained merely by looking at a specimen grossly, such as diagnoses, staging, and treatment effects. These new posts pay homage to gross pathology by focusing on the beauty and artistry of the specimens.
The Twitter post utilizes a gross photograph of a polycystic kidney. To the uninitiated, this photo looks like nothing more than a chunk of red-tan Swiss cheese. However, to us, the experts in gross pathology, one look at this image and we instantly know what this is. To complement the image, a few different hashtags were created, such as #fallforpathology, #PathArt, and #grossisbeautiful. It’s the last hashtag, #grossisbeautiful, that really speaks volumes. The hashtag itself is an oxymoron, as something that is gross is usually not associated with beauty. To a pathologists’ assistant, on the other hand, gross pathology is an art form that allows one to appreciate the beauty and intricacies of every specimen.
The next two posts found on Instagram and Facebook demonstrate the classic gross appearance of a papillary fibroelastoma. Using the tagline “to us, this looks like a patient about to get a cancer-free diagnosis”, this post helps to reiterate not only the importance of gross pathology, but also about the importance of having highly trained, highly educated certified pathologists’ assistants working on a patient’s specimen. To the general public, if they were to receive this tumor from the heart, they might become despondent. To a trained certified pathologists’ assistant, however, we are fully aware that this is a benign tumor and that the patient is going to be okay (minus, you know, having heart surgery and all).
The last post found on LinkedIn shows a heart with fibrinous pericarditis. The idea of sectioning into a heart may appear to be morbid, but a pathologists’ assistant understands how important each specimen is and why treating the specimen with the utmost respect translates to treating the patient with the utmost respect. To go along with this, one of my favorite hashtags is used in this post: #grossinggenius. If anything is going to articulate our mastery of gross pathology in a succinct manner, it is going to be that hashtag.
Look for these new posts on the AAPA’s social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn), as well as at the upcoming 2021 AAPA Virtual Spring Meeting. We encourage you to share the posts, making sure to use the new hashtags created, such as #fallforpathology, #PathArt, and #grossisbeautiful, to help bring attention to gross pathology and pathologists’ assistants. By getting you, our members, involved, we can help the AAPA reach a much wider audience outside of our membership.
We look forward to “seeing you” and celebrating how #grossisbeautiful at the AAPA Virtual Spring Meeting, March 20-21!
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