Would competitive specialties be competitive if everyone made the same?

[Trigeminal]

Yes. This.

Personally, I wouldn’t want to be in medicine at all outside of the OR. Wouldn’t even be a consideration.

Certainly not how most people feel and that’s fine, but we definitely exist and it has nothing to do with an “MS3 epiphany.”

If I could, I would sedate a patient during a consultation. That's how much I love "medicine". Just give me the scalpel and I am happy. A chance to cut is a chance to cure.

[GasFIRE]

Side-note, kind of funny that to my knowledge ive never seen a neurosurgeon posting on any financial forum, whether for docs or not. Radiology, anesthesiology, and EM on the other hand appear way overrepresented.

I think shift work has a lot to do with this, having defined off time. Even suffering through mid-career burnout and recovering, given a re-do I would still end up in anesthesiology. The OR has an immediacy to action that I need. Rounding and clinic drove me crazy in med school. I wanted nothing to do with that and am fortunate medicine is broad enough to accommodate a variety of personalities.

[Sundance]

Ha. No.

I would happily trade my call, nights, people dying, complications. I think I would do geriatrics or palliative care. Zero stress.

[pit.alumni]

And how about the Emergency Medicine match this year? EM was only 3 to 4 years, shift work at 36 hours a week, with plentiful jobs paying 350 to 400k. The med students were lining up to match in EM.

Then Covid happened and the ED volume tanked, the job market tanked for new grads, and the med students went running for the exits, all in the course of 1 year. 67 EM programs did not fill, hundreds of open spots.

So yes, compensation and jobs matter.

Between Private Equity and the no surprises act Emergency Medicine has been screwed. Most of the blame lays with Private Equity that for years overbilled patients and lead to the no surprises act in the first place. Now Private Equity is doubling down asking Physicians to generate unsustainable RVUs and pushing APPs to take on more than they are really trained to do. The specialty of Emergency Medicine started to get true specialists to handle Emergencies as opposed to rotating members of the medical staff. At the rate it is headed when you are truly having a serious emergency you're either going to see an overworked MD who's spending more time staring at a compute, dealing with the EMR and ticking boxes than taking care of patients or a midlevel that may or may not get it right.

[Shant]

Sundance you are twisting my mind with your strategies to avoid patients dying on you.

[pysibal]

Regarding community standing, try being in PMR or psychiatry. People will think you're a physical therapist or LCSW.

[HikingDO]

Ha. No.

I would happily trade my call, nights, people dying, complications. I think I would do geriatrics or palliative care. Zero stress.

If you think doing geriatrics is zero stress you’ve never done geriatrics.

[Kamban]

Ha. No.I would happily trade my call, nights, people dying, complications. I think I would do geriatrics or palliative care. Zero stress.

Try doing some palliative care briefly and let us know. It is more stressful and exhausting than many other medical specialties. You know what I dread most - seeing a report of a so called "cured" breast cancer patient who has a cough and her CT shows lung nodules. I dread that follow up visit and it is exhausting for me but literally life changing for her.

Compared to that using a scalpel or writing chemo orders is nothing at all.

[Sundance]

Try doing some palliative care briefly and let us know. It is more stressful and exhausting than many other medical specialties. You know what I dread most - seeing a report of a so called "cured" breast cancer patient who has a cough and her CT shows lung nodules. I dread that follow up visit and it is exhausting for me but literally life changing for her.

Compared to that using a scalpel or writing chemo orders is nothing at all.

You’re right. Palliative care seems emotionally difficult and draining.

[Hatton]

Try doing some palliative care briefly and let us know. It is more stressful and exhausting than many other medical specialties. You know what I dread most - seeing a report of a so called "cured" breast cancer patient who has a cough and her CT shows lung nodules. I dread that follow up visit and it is exhausting for me but literally life changing for her.

Compared to that using a scalpel or writing chemo orders is nothing at all.

Your baby is dead was the conversation I hated most.

[xraygoggles]

No way would anyone go through the stress, sacrifice, and long training periods of ortho/neurosurg/CT surg if they weren't highly compensated.

Derm, path, rads, gas - lifestyle jobs with good risk/reward re: compensation v time spent.

[BigoteGrande]

IIRC Peds is usually super competitive in socialized countries

[Sigrid]

Ha. No.

I would happily trade my call, nights, people dying, complications. I think I would do geriatrics or palliative care. Zero stress.

*cries with laughter* Spend one day in a geriatrics clinic and then tell me it's "zero stress". It's 80% social problems you can't fix, 15% patients yelling at you because THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH ME, HOW DARE YOU TELL ME I SHOULDN'T BE DRIVING ANY MORE, and 5% actual medicine. Give me an EM shift with people dying on me any day. At least I can do something about that.

[bovie]

No way would anyone go through the stress, sacrifice, and long training periods of ortho/neurosurg/CT surg if they weren't highly compensated.

Given the option between CT and, say, FM--could choose many others, fill in your preference--with equal pay and similar enough hours post-training, I'd do CT 8 days a week.

In the real world the money helps and is important of course, but I'd rather spend the day doing a Ross or a debranching than chatting with 25 different people about how they should lose weight, exercise more, and eat better (simplified, of course)--all of whom already know it but will be unlikely to heed my advice regardless.

I imagine it's not too different for some if not many of the orthopods and neuros.

It's about how you prefer to spend your time and what revs your engine as much as it is about the compensation.

[Auric goldfinger]

Plastics was lucrative, but I hated it toward the end. To this day, i have zero respect for cosmetic surgeons- be they actual plastic surgeons or the wanna-be crowd of Otos, Derms, and Ophthalmologists with the plastics -suffix. I might have been in the upper echelons of plastics earners, but I now
regard it as a waste of a good mind and hands.