Hematologist

Disorders of the blood and their related body organs are vast and complex disease processes. Doctors who treat them require special medical training to ensure people with these diseases are able to receive proper treatment. However, not all blood diseases need to be treated by a hematologist. The term hematology is defined as the study of one particular branch of medicine concerned with blood, the blood-forming organs, and blood diseases. Hematology includes the study of etiology, diagnosis, treatment, prognosis, and prevention of blood diseases. A doctor who specializes in this diagnosing and treating is called a hematologist.

Work for hematologists may range from the management of a hematology laboratory, work at a microscope viewing blood and bone marrow slides, to interpretation of various other blood test results. By viewing blood under the microscope, a doctor is able to visually see if the cells are of normal shape, size, and number. Variation in any of these from what is considered “normal” may indicate a blood disease is present. Sometimes, parasites can even be seen in blood cells and lead to the diagnosis of malaria, for example. Besides looking at blood, some other tests involve reacting blood with specific chemicals to see how the blood behaves. For example to check if a person has a bleeding disorder, a chemical is added to the blood which causes it to react and form a blood clot. The amount of time necessary for blood to clot is recorded. Normal times have been established through experiments, thus by comparing the test person's time to the normal test value, a hematologist can determine if a bleeding disorder is present. This is just one example of hundreds of blood tests performed.

Examples of common diseases treated by hematologists are anemia, disorders of blood clotting, and leukemia. Anemia is simply a decrease in the number of red blood cells, also known as the oxygen carying cells of the human body. Without these cells, we would not be able to get oxygen to the rest of our body. Causes of anemia are great, but most commonly, it is simply a decreased amount of iron in the body which is necessary for red blood cell function. Anemia can also be caused by destruction of blood cells by parasites like those that cause malaria (plasmodium falciparum, for example). One of the many other causes of anemia worthy of mention is because of vitamin defficiency or failure of proper resorption of vitamins required in the steps of making red blood cells. A hematologist must explore all of these possibilities of causes of anemia including, but not mentioned above, leukemia or blood cancer in order to help resolve a patient's underlying cause of anemia.

Hemophilia is a disease that results from lack of certain blood-clotting factors. There are different types based on which factor is missing. A well-known person with hemophilia in recent past was Ryan White. He may be better known from his fight for civil rights of those with HIV. Ryan White contracted HIV through a blood transfusion as part of his treatment for hemophilia. This is not very common anymore due to screening and a better understanding of the AIDS virus, but in the 1980s, there was a poor understanding of this virus.

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