I asked Dr. Boyfriend the same thing about urology, and his response was pretty much Green Bean’s - you never know what will grab your attention.
Remember, too, that a doctor doesn’t look at your ass and say, “EWW! Gross! I’m not going in there!” You are a piece of meat to them, and they are only interested in your organs and the problems you have for them to solve. In a detatched sort of way, you’re not a person at all - that’s part of their job description. So, if the digestive tract or the urinary tract or ear/nose/throat or whatever interests them, they pursue it. And, yes, the financiality of their specialty influences them as well. (For the record, Dr. Boyfriend is going into family practice.)
The medical student regimen is fascinating to me as well, as Dr. Boyfriend is the second med student I’ve dated.
Dr. Boyfriend got his undergraduate degree at Johns Hopkins in Biology and I think Chemistry. He then took two years and did research at the NIH in Bethesda. Then he got into Robert Wood Johnson medical school in New Jersey (and also just recently completed his Master’s degree in public health).
The first two years of med school, from what I understand, are just that - school, classes, whatnot. Your third and fourth years you do rotations every 4 weeks in different fields - neurology, OB/GYN, ER, internal medicine, etc. - but you’re still considered a student, so you watch and learn and go to the occassional lecture and have to take tests on what you’ve learned.
Then, when you graduate, not only can you write prescriptions (woo hoo!), you have the option of just going into private practice, which means you’re a General Practitioner; this option is hardly ever taken up on, because today it’s specialize, specialize, specialize, so almost all medical school graduates interview at different hospitals for the program they wish to become “board certified” in - surgery, family practice, urology, ENT, ER, whatever. (GP’s are also mostly out of date because Family Practice is now an accepted residency program, but it’s still a fairly new specialized field per se.) (Oh, and the process for interviewing and matching at programs is very, very interesting, but I’ll leave that for another post if you want the info.) So, since Dr. Boyfriend wants to go into FP, he interviewed at about 11 different programs, and got matched at Jefferson Hospital here in Philadelphia, where he will spend the next 3 years to get board certified in family practice. During this time he will continue to do rotations as a resident, but it is a specialized regimen to his program - he’ll do OB/GYN, pediatrics, some surgery, but he won’t have to do, for example, neurology, beyond knowing the basics he’s already learned. And after those 3 years, he opens shop, either in a hospital, on his own, or in a clinic.
(He also informed me that he’s now about $77K in debt, which is less than I thought he’d be.)
Does that help, luv?
Esprix
Ask the Gay Guy!
