BY AKINWALE ABOLUWADE, IBADAN
The Head of Department, Anatomy and Pathology, UniOsun Teaching Hospital, Osogbo, Prof. Abiodun Afolayan, has cautioned members of the public against making assumption on causes of death saying that autopsy is the most reliable and scientific way of ascertaining actual cause(s) of death, not mere speculations.
Speculations, conjectures and cultural explanations, according to the don, may lead to controversies and family or public mistrust.
Afolayan, a Consultant Pathologist, spoke recently at the Grand Round forum for staff of the teaching hospital in Osogbo, the Osun State capital.
Grand Round is an open monthly meeting at UniOsun Teaching Hospital, Osogbo, during which experts meet to deliberate on specialised topics with a view to deepening the knowledge and clearing doubts with staff of the hospital regarding medical issues and practices.
The don described autopsy as an important process of clearing doubts about circumstances and pathology surrounding death.
“Autopsy is the most reliable and scientific way of ascertaining the true cause of death rather than mere speculations, conjectures and cultural explanations which often may lead to controversies and family or public mistrust.
“It is a form of information to the relations of the deceased to clear doubts. In some situations, people attribute deaths to speculated reasons which, often than not, are not true,” he said.
According to him, there are some diseases that run in the family which, often, may lead to a death pattern in such family. He said through autopsy, the actual causes of a death pattern, resulting from particular diseases in the family, could be ascertained.
Where this is done, he said, further deaths could be prevented in such a family.
Afolayan disabused the minds of members of the public from what he called the ill-conceived opinions that pathologists usually harvest organs from dead human bodies during autopsy for sale or for nocturnal purposes.
He said though relatively, autopsy could be voluntary but in coroner cases it is compulsory especially when death cases are reported to the police.
He further disclosed that Coroner’s autopsy must also be conducted on patients who died in uncertain circumstances such as patients who were brought in dead, those who died within 24 hours of being admitted, patients who died from homicide etc. Such cases, he said, were beyond the relatives of the dead.
He added, “Autopsy can be expedited to meet request for early burial as it may be necessary in some religions as long as it is not a coroner case.”
