<p>I really think surgery would be exciting (I've shadowed and like it so far) but I hear that the time commitment is difficult for people who want social and family lives. Are there any other intensive/really exciting jobs in medicine that do not have as serious a time commitment?</p>
<p>Alternatively, are there any lists for every type of doctor in the country? I might be able to use that to make a small list of jobs that might be fun for me.</p>
<p>Pediatricians have set office hours in private practice. Some surgeons have set schedules also if you decide not to be on call.</p>
<p>Here are descriptions of all medical residency specialties from WashU. Included in the description are the relative competitiveness of each specialty, length of training required, subspecialty fellowships available, and general salary guidelines:</p>
<p><a href=“http://residency.wustl.edu/choosing/specdesc/Pages/Home.aspx”>http://residency.wustl.edu/choosing/specdesc/Pages/Home.aspx</a></p>
<p>The list pretty well covers “every type of doctor”</p>
<p>Here’s a chart of average hours worked per week by specialty. (Somewhat out of date since data is from 2005)</p>
<p><a href=“Physician Work Hours by Medical Specialty”>http://www.medfriends.org/specialty_hours_worked.htm</a></p>
<p>Specialties that are considered more “family friendly” include: emergency medicine (no call, no overtime), derm, opthalmology, family practice, pediatrics, psychiatry, neurology, PMR (physiatry), pathology, some IM specialties.</p>
<p>Also a physician can accept a hospitalist position with large medical practice groups and work regularly specified hours. (Hospitalists work only with acutely ill hospitalized patients.)</p>
<p>Being an ER doc or hospitalist may be exciting, especially as you may see a lot of trauma cases in big cities. They tend to have regular hours that are predictable. What is ‘exciting’ varies by the individual. My bro likes his field, ophthalmology; his wife prefers her dermatology. They have an excellent quality of life and very little “call.” Both fields are extremely competitive. </p>
<p>Thanks a lot for that list from WUSTL</p>
<p>How easy is it to become an ER surgeon with a set schedule instead of just being on call all day? Can other surgeons do this as well?</p>
<p>There is no such thing as an “ER surgeon”. </p>
<p>You’re either a emergency medicine physician or a general surgeon with a subspecialty in trauma surgery. </p>
<p>Trauma surgery is extremely demanding with among the longest hours of any the surgical specialties. They can work fixed shifts, including just daylight shifts (although that involves having a certain amount of seniority), but they are always ‘on call’ in case of mass casualty events and are required to carry their pager 2/47. Additionally trauma surgeons have other lifestyle restrictions like being required to live within a certain distance of their hospital. </p>
<p>EM doctors have among the shortest work week of all physicians, and are never ‘on call’ or subject to overtime. However, EM docs all work rotating shifts and don’t routinely get weekends or holidays off. (It’s the ‘shared pain’ experience in EM: no one ever is assigned just to day shifts or just to night shifts. Everyone takes their turn working nights, swing shift, weekends and holidays.)</p>
<p>Here’s a more recently evaluation of physician work hours:</p>
<p>Arch Intern Med. 2011 Jul 11;171(13):1211-3. doi: 10.1001/archinternmed.2011.294.
Annual work hours across physician specialties.
Leigh JP, Tancredi D, Jerant A, Kravitz RL.</p>
<p>The differential between the longest average work and the shortest average work week is 25 hours.</p>
<p>Longest work hours–surgical specialties (neurosurgery, thoracic surgery, vascular surgery), critical care, neonatal and perinatal medicine. Shortest work week: occupational medicine, emergency medicine, PMR and dermatology.</p>
<p>“Are there any other intensive/really exciting jobs in medicine that do not have as serious a time commitment?”</p>
<p>These comments always crack me up. You do realized that you work your butt off in college, medical school, internship, residency and then fellowship? I’m sorry, but medicine comes with a serious time commitment. ER docs work 10-12 hour shifts with heavy workloads. Almost every surgeon I know in all specialties work long hours and take call. I consider my field pretty cushy (ENT) and I still work 60-70 hour weeks and also take call fairly regularly.</p>
<p>Becoming a doctor takes a huge time commitment. If you really don’t want that sort of time commitment, perhaps you should consider another field of study.</p>
<p>There are lots of health careers that are less time intensive than becoming a doc. Seems like these would be a good place to start exploring. The fact that psychiatrists or dermatologists may spend a few hours less a week working and may only be on call one weekend a month, is somewhat irrelevant if it’s going to take 12 years of very intense training and loads of lost weekends and sleepless nights to get to that point.</p>
<p>i meant doctors with less of a time commitment than surgeons. </p>
<p>H works 70-80 hours a week in geriatrics (FP/IM) solo practice and most of that is NOT spent on patient care but on record keeping and consulting with other physicians and patients’ family members. 24/7 call. Trying to find a partner, but difficult–I can’t think of a “less popular” specialty, and not highly paid. I would say ER if OP likes blood and guts and wants to work shifts. Or perhaps surgical nursing would be more family-friendly? I have other family members who are FP and Peds–both work shifts in urgent care/ER. They used to be in private practices/take call, but this is how they control their hours to make time for their own family. The training for any kind of medical specialty is a huge and serious time commitment, no getting around that. And what about the years of living in poverty and the years (decades?) paying off debt? A job that is “fun” and “not a serious time commitment?” Probably not medicine.</p>
<p>Chem…maybe it would help us understand better if you told us WHY you want to become a doctor. It sounds like you want a profession where you can earn a LOT of money, but you don’t really want to work all that hard to do so. Maybe that isn’t what you are thinking, but it’s how you come across here.</p>
<p>Every doctor I know (and we know a LOT of doctors) works many, many more than 40 hours a week. They have on call times on weekends and in the evenings on a rotation. They are routinely at work before 7 a.m and often work well into the evening. Their work isn’t easy. They need to be in top of their game ALL the time.</p>
<p>Your weekly schedule can also depend upon where you work, which hospital, which group… there are many variables. One job can have you working 120 hours a week working for a large group, or about 40 or so in a limited private practice. There are so many variables. Some physicians can work part time hours if they have a family, but this is unusual. Just count on working your tail off for many years. Missing your children’s first words, first steps, and first day of school is not unusual. If you don’t like the hours of one group, hospital or position, you can quit and move. Usually you have to move several hours away minimum as there are non-compete agreements to worry about. </p>
<p>Skydiving photographer is exciting with shorter hours than a general surgeon.</p>
<p>I answered your previous post on this question which was moved to another forum. Basically, you can have controlled hours as a surgeon or surgical subspecialty if you work for Kaiser…or maybe the Veteran Administration Hospital.</p>
<p>In re atomom’s post: Physicians with this type of practice are slowly disappearing. New physicians have a day practice. If someone goes to the hospital none of their physicians will visit the patient. The patient will have a ‘hospitalist specialist’ from intake to dismissal.<br>
IMO this type of care is great for the young and healthy. It stinks for the elderly. The hospitalist has no ongoing relationship with the patient’s needs.<br>
Self edit to stop the rant. Anyone going into medicine as a profession today cannot guess what it will be like five or ten years from now. My doctor friends tell me that they work lives can change drastically from day to day.</p>
<p>Our insurance agent is wealthier than most docs we know. How about selling insurance and doing something fun and exciting (like blood? cutting into flesh?–how about hunting?) on the weekends.</p>
<p>Work hours are extremely variable even among the same specialties. There are FPs and pediatricians who work 70+ hours per week and surgeons who work less than that. I’ve been on Q2-3 calls for the last 10.5 years of my career and easily put in more hours than our cardiac surgeons. Nothing to be proud of, but that is the variability of the work hours. One of my colleagues in Denver worked 35-45 hours per week and had 18 weeks of vacation. Same specialty, but completely different hours.</p>
<p>You have to examine why you want to go to medical school. You will inevitably have long hours through medical school and residency, even beyond the 80 hours per week when you add studying. You also don’t know which end of the spectrum you will be in when you finish residency. Things will change completely when you eventually become an attending. So, please make sure you are pursuing the profession for the right reasons. The money is not as good as people think. The hassle is worse than you can imagine. But if you entered the profession because of the impact you can make for others, you will prevail over all of the headaches.</p>
<p>I gave a long answer in response to the other thread you started asking practically the same thing.</p>
<p>You have a long road ahead, with years of long work hours and no or low pay: four years of college, four years of med school and four to ten years of residency.</p>
<p>Just getting there is a huge time commitment.</p>
<p>What is it you really want to know?</p>
<p>I have two friends who chose dermatology for the lifestyle/money, and even so, they are not particularly happy. One is a single parent, still paying off school loans and strssed about money and lack of time with her daughter. The other has an adult aged disabled child who requires full time care, and who will always live at home. He and his wife haven’t had a long vacation together In twenty three years because of the difficulty of finding respite care for their son. </p>
<p>Life throws curveballs. Pick a profession you love because you love it.</p>
<p>I totally agree with eastcoscrazy. </p>