I have two jobs right now one as a silly administrative organizer of our animal testing bio ethics committee and the other doing the gross lab work for a neurologist. I don’t know how I ended up here. Brain stuff was never my thing. They lost me at action potential.
Forensic Pathologist. gotta love decay.
Podiatrist, I am really good at making feet feel better and work better, and the world is full of messed-up feet. Dermatology would be good, I like talking about the evils of sun damage
A friend of mine, a doctor, said that in medical school all the students who were in it for the money were going to specialize in urology. Very little call, high paying, low stress careers. It has made me think dimly of urologists ever since. She is in family practice, a speciality that, along with pediatrics, is the speciality most female students are attracted to. More hands-on patient care.
Me – all else being equal, I’d be an OB/GYN. Of course for the problems Why pointed out, it would be extremely difficult, but I can think of nothing more satisfying that bringing new life into the world!
I’m a doctor, can I join in?
I have to apply for a training programme in January.
I get to apply for 4 specialties in one area, or 1 specialty in 4 areas. Since I don’t want to leave N. Ireland (husband, family, his job etc.) I have to apply for 4 specialties.
So far…
O&G- I love it.
It’s rewarding, there is medicine, surgery, delivering babies, oncology, urology, family planning, GUM clinics- you can deliver a totally holistic service to your patient from puberty until death. You have to work nights, weekends and at the age of 50 you’ll probably be the only senior doctor actually in the hospital at night, but it’s still cool. Also, being a small woman is actually an advantage in this specialty, wearing size 5 gloves is my USP!
GP- I could be a GP with a special interest in women’s health and do Well Woman clinics, antenatal care, family planning, home deliveries and GUM clinics. The upside is good money, 9-5 Mon-Fri, the downside is that you get 7 minutes per patient, some of them are heartsinks and anything interesting is done by a specialist.
Now I have to think of another two…
Dermatology- Dull, dull, dull but the scope for private practice is immense, and if money is short you just do a few Botox parties. Again Mon-Fri, 9-5, but it’s difficult to get into and you have to do several years of horrible hospital general medicine before you can specialise. Yuck.
Opthalmology- Mon-Fri 9-5, some surgery and you can make the blind see! Still, lots of physics (light and lenses are not my strong suit), competitive and on a general basis, incredibly boring as all you do for 90% of the time is administer eye tests ad nauseum.
Microbiology- Little to no patient contact, lots of time in the lab and your medical knowledge is pretty much limited to infections and antibiotics. Mon-Fri 9-5, the odd phone call at night about which antibiotics to choose, and that’s it. Not exciting, but not terrible either.
Pathology- Same as micro, but more time looking down microscopes and more knowledge of obscure pathological diagnoses, which almost always can be summed up as “cancer- nasty”. Not really my thing.
Emergency medicine- horrible job, horrible hours (yes it’s only 10 hour shifts, but it’s 10 hour shifts that can start or end at 2am, and you work a 3 weekends on, 3 weekends off pattern, so you can’t have a life). Not glamorous and not fun, definitely not for me.
Surgery-Yup, that I could do. Nights and weekends suck, but the work itself is good, although surgical outpatient clinics are horrible.
Hospital medicine- Just soul-destroying. Smokers dying from smoking, drinkers dying from drinking, the elderly dying from being old, the obese dying from being obese…and you in the middle trying to make sure it doesn’t happen on your shift.
Palliative care- Well, you can’t make the situation worse…
No, actually it’s a good job, with definite aims and holistic care, and the job satisfaction is high when you do the job well.
Anaesthetics- Your job involves pain relief, knocking people out and sticking needles and tubes into places needles and tubes were never designed to go. It’s a good job, unfortunately you have to do rotations in emergency medicine, ITU, cardiology and surgery before you can specialise and that would kill me. Oh, and anaesthetists have high levels of on the job suicide, because they have access to all the good drugs. About 5 years ago, in a hospital where I used to work, someone barricaded themselves into a treatment room and committed suicide with an overdose of anaesthetic, insulin and muscle relaxant…not good.
Paediatrics- when stuff goes wrong, it goes wrong fast, and the consequences are horrible. I couldn’t do that job.
Looks like I’m going to apply for:
O&G
GP
Palliative care
and something else, when I can decide on the least of a lot of evils.
With the benefit of hindsight, pharmacy and dentistry are becoming more appealing!
Chill. The comment was meant as a warning about consequences of that choice, not a moral judgement.
Neurology or oncology. I like the idea of long-term relationships with patients; I think the potential to help at some level (even if there’s not a cure, which I understand is true in many cases in these specialties) is better when you get to know people.
But all-in-all I’d rather be a medical social worker.
That “far less expensive” person would be me, a psychologist. As in the old joke “what’s the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist? Oh, about $75,000 a year.”
Oh, well, I love it. And like you said, I get to actually listen to clients, as opposed to writing the script and shoving them out the door.
Interesting to me that so many of you want to be psychiatrists, and I wonder if it is based on the misconception that Internet Legend pointed out.
Me, I would want to be a family practice doctor or in palliative care.
I made the same quip to my dermatologist. He told me he’s part of a program that does free tattoo removal for people who want to put their gang past behind them. A wonderful, and quite serious, idea.
To the OP. I’d choose to be a competent MD. I’m 100% sure I’d be the other kind - no matter my specialty. I never considered medicine as a career, and all of my potential patients should be grateful for my choice.
Just out of curiousity, what’s your job-related stress level like? One of the reasons that I really couldn’t do your job is that I’ve seen how much empathy is required for a psychologist to do his or her job, and how much pain and agony they deal with.
I was just re-reading Frederick Pohl’s Gateway, a very good SF adventure book, but with a heavy side of psychoanalysis - and the main character makes the point that patients often seem to be trying dump their pain onto their therapist. And then wondered what the therapist can do with all that pain.
And while I know that’s not a completely accurate description, it’s got more truth to it than I’d care for, in your shoes.
So, how do you deal with all that pain?
What?? Somebody cares about…me?? <tears of joy, small sniff>
Just kidding. For me, the pain is there in the room–I feel tons of sympathy for my clients who are struggling. But…and here is the good part…I can usually leave it in the room, and not worry about them too much in between sessions. Recently, I had a woman I was really worried about. She had two suicide attempts in the past 8 months, both precipitated by conflict with her spouse. She called to say that they had a fight and were divorcing. Yikes. I was really worried about her for a few days, and called her daily, and saw her several times, along with calling her sister, etc. Fortunately, those kinds of stress don’t occur that often. Also, you have to remember that I get to celebrate with those who are feeling better, too. That helps with the painful sessions.
Rheumatology. I think it’s the most fascinating subject, especially autoimmune disorders.
If I can’t do that, then endocrinology, instead. Diabetes, fear my wrath!
I’m also a first year medical student and I’m leaning very strongly towards radiology right now.
Other options include family practice or emergency medicine.
Here’s a cartoon formed from gross misconceptions and stereotypes, but it’s funny, and somehow it seems to contain some level of truth. Enjoy.
Not to mention that, AIUI/IME, psychiatrists learn about as much about talk therapy in college as psychologists learn about drug therapy. Which is to say, not enough to be effective in it. This isn’t meant as a slam on psychiatrists, because psychiatric treatment is important and necessary to many people; my point is just that:
If you go to a psychologist and ask for drug therapy, they have to refer you to a psychiatrist*
but
If you go to a psychiatrist and ask for talk therapy, they can do it themselves
even though the care provider’s level of knowledge is roughly equal in both cases.
In response to the idea that pathology is a good medical career because you don’t have to deal with living people…uh, not so.
As a pathologist, I handle somewhere in the neighborhood of 5000 cases a year. About 8 of those are autopsies; all the rest involve live patients. A lot of responsibility is involved (my sister once casually remarked to me that “well, at least you can’t kill anybody”). Dead wrong. If you fail to make the diagnosis or make a wrong one, the patient might well die.
It’s also not a field for someone with rotten people skills. While most pathologists rarely come face-to-face with patients, we deal directly with other physicians and lab workers many times a day. If you can’t handle those interactions well, patient care suffers and your career may also.
If I had an alternative medical field to pick, it would probably involve some facet of internal medicine. I enjoyed rounding with the infectious disease service. Some of the other subspecialties like neurology and nephrology (kidney disease) are also interesting.
Stuff I would stay miles away from:
By the way, I’ve known two pathologists who changed course after years in pathology. One was a 40ish guy who went back into residency to become an internist; another went into psychiatry. I haven’t known any MDs who went in the other direction, but there were a couple in path residency who started out training in different fields. One time a medicine resident was thinking of switching to pathology, and they paired her with me (I was in my third year of training) during an autopsy rotation. She was quickly convinced to continue in internal medicine. I think she didn’t enjoy doing bowel runs (cleaning out intestinal contents and going through the length of the bowel looking for lesions).
Some folks just don’t appreciate the fun stuff.
Wait, pathologists aren’t MDs?
I’m an internist, and I have a hard time imagining doing anything else. I’m not a big fan of doing procedures, so anything surgical would be out, and I don’t really like working with kids.
I wouldn’t mind being a hospitalist, which is just an internist who sees nothing but hospitalized patients. I could see doing another internal medicine specialty like nephrology or endocrinology.
If I had to leave IM altogether, psychiatry wouldn’t be bad.
No, they most definitely are MD’s. They do 4 years of medical school and then a residency in pathology. I don’t know if that includes a general type of internship year or not.
Jackmannii makes an excellent point regarding the social skills of pathologists. People say the same thing about radiology, “oh, they just sit in the dark and read films all day,” but the value of a pathologist or radiologist lies in being a clear and effective consultant to a clinician, either via a report, a phone call, or in person.
I don’t have any real experience in pathology, but in radiology, everyone I have met is as outgoing as any other specialty. At least in academic medicine; this may be less true for people in private practice that do less teaching.
Oh. It’s one of those “sane and healthy” things that other people claim to be able to do. 
Well, there’s a difference between “sane and healthy” and “sane and healthy therapist”, the latter of which sets the bar much higher.