Seems like the stereotypical Mount Everest of medicine is to be a neurosurgeon. On the other hand, I can’t imagine many med students being enthusiastic about being a proctologist.
What are the desirable and undesirable fields to pursue, in the eyes of med students, nurses, etc.?
A doctor once told me the acronym HAND for the 4 most desirable fields. Sadly this was a decade ago and I’ve forgotten what most of them are.
D is Dermatology. A is I believe anesthesiology. I forget what H and N stood for. But apparently dermatology is a very desired field because of good work/life balance and good pay.
Income is just one aspect of medicine. A good work life balance, not constantly being on call, etc. are also very important.
I think orthopedics is generally the highest paying though. That or plastic surgery.
General practitioner and pediatrician seem to be on the bottom rungs of the totem pole. Which sucks because we need GPs and pediatricians.
This is all second hand info.
At the time I was finishing residency in 2006 dermatology was seen as the most desirable specialty, and was probably the most difficult residency to match in. Dermatology was seen as the field with the best combination of decent hours and highest pay.
CNA (certified nursing assistant) is close to the bottom.
There is a genre of joke in the medical profession that goes “How do you hide a hundred dollar bill from a ___?”.
How do you hide a hundred dollar bill from a neurosurgeon?
Tape it to his kid’s forehead.
Radiologist was a choice field for a long time. Then the technology got so good they could outsource a lot of the work to other countries.
Do they? I thought it was such that any physicians in another country have to have a U.S. license, meaning they did a U.S. residency, meaning they competed for an artificially capped number of residency spots. (which I read have not been raised in over 10 years, and these days not every medical student who graduates from a med school in USA can even have a spot as there are not enough)
They do, but here’s a story about the situation in India. It seems their main concern is a shortage of board-certified radiologists. Apparently most of the Indian physicians who study in the U.S. eventually stay here, but it is happening.
Here’s a hospital that outsourced their overnight radiology to board-certified doctors in Europe (taking advantage of the time difference.)
Pharmacy is headed in that direction. 
Watch the ‘Toe Bro’, chiropodiatrist, or something like that. Must be the absolute grossest show I’ve ever watched. Gak!!
Is that a You Tube channel? If it’s what I think it is, it rivals eyeball surgery in the grossness department.
Hard to answer “desirable” but a proxy for “competitive” could be the average scores on the tests taken after year 2, the STEP.
The link above can be perused to make those comparisons. Chart 7 is best.
Yes Derm and Plastics require higher scores to match well and Family Med not as high. Peds in between FWIW.
ROAD: radiology , opthmalogy, anesthesiology, dermatology
I wanted to add radiology maybe not so lucrative, many major hospitals around me outsource to India as x-ray images can be emailed.
For eye surgeons, the big benefit I heard was doing day shift residencies and not have to go around the clock like ER.
For the bottom, a psychiatrist told me when I was working at the hospital how there were so many openings for psychiatric residencies across the U.S.
I think it’s TLC. Same channel as ‘Dr. Pimple Popper’, which makes me want to puke, alot.
Neurosurgeon is not what /everybody/ wants to do. It is, for the most part, shift work, and incredibly tedious: you have to be very very good and very very careful.
My mother, like many others at one time, became a family doctor/ GP / children’s doctor. Because she wanted to be a Doctor, not some highly paid technician.
There are a class of jobs that are ‘hands off’. Stuff like radiology and psychiatry. These are particularly attractive to high-cast Hindu’s, but also to lots of other people who just don’t like touching strangers.
There are a class of jobs that (in certain places) that are dominated by cultural/religious/racial groups. People go into perhaps “Cardiology” because that’s what the parents of their friends do. People don’t go into perhaps “Cardiology” because their aren’t any training positions free for people who aren’t the children of friends.
There are a class of jobs that may be particularly lucrative. Radiology was like this for a fairly long time, because Radiologists owned their own equipment. When the equipment is owned by a separate company, that separate company gets all the profit share attributed to that. Anaesthesia has been pretty good, because it’s a boring job that takes a lot of training.
There really is a very wide range of what individual medical graduates are looking for – status, wealth, excitement, stability, whatever – even before you get down to individual preferences. Difficulty of getting into particular areas depends a lot more on how many training positions are available than on any other factor.
I’ve read somewhere that being the physician who gives routine health checks is one of the most boring jobs.
In Japan they have centers just for people’s annual health checks and the physical is working on an assembly line, checking hundreds of healthy people a day with catching only a few with problems.
I’d like to think some medical students choose a particular path because it’s interesting, challenging, or something they’re personally interested in, as opposed to lower stress or higher pay. Is that naive of me?
So where does urology and proctology fall in the spectrum, in real life to actual med students?
They’re kinda insta-jokes to the general public (so perhaps less competition for spots) and seem like they’d mostly keep normal daytime hours (as opposed to middle-of-the-night work like labor/delivery or trauma surgery) and I don’t for a minute believe it’s inherently much more gross than many other body fluids and tissues and smells.
Maybe those secretly are the “good” jobs in medical care after all.
My understanding is that things like labor/delivery or trauma surgery aren’t always middle-of-the-night work, because most such doctors are part of a group practice and alternate on-call schedules. So if you’re an OB/GYN with say a dozen patients who are at full term, you may not be the one to come in at midnight when they’re ready to deliver if it’s not your on call week. So much of the time, you’ve got a regular 9am-5pm schedule.