<p>I'm trying to decide whether to go medicine or research. Please give me some cons.</p>
<p>I'm not sure that this is a great place to post this question, because the things that are truly turnoffs may not be apparent to the pre-meds who post here, the pre-clinical med students, and definitely not me as a fourth year med student. </p>
<p>Common things:
[ul]
[li]Hours - much is made about the 80 hour work week for residents, and just as frequently it's mentioned that there are no work hour restrictions once you're done with residency/fellowship. You will work ALOT. Even in the lifestyle fields like Derm, a 40 hour work week is uncommon.</p>[/li]
<p>[li]Standard of perfection - patients think that you have all the answers, when really, we're just playing the odds. Lab tests have false positives and false negatives, drugs cause side effects, surgeries fix what we think is the problem but it may not be. </p>[/li]
<p>[li]Dealing with other's problems - people come to see you when they're feeling their worst...and they're often not happy about it. And further (as I've had to tell my roommate recently) they don't care how your feeling or how your day has gone. They expect you, as the doctor, to be strong for them. </p>[/li]
<p>[<em>]Same </em>**, different day - the entire breadth of medicine has a lot of interesting pathology out there and it's easy to think "I could never be bored as a doctor" (especially easy trap to fall into if you watch House all the time). Definitely not the case...every specialty has it's 4 or 5 things that you're going to see over and over and over and over again. General internal medicine: get ready for blood pressure and diabetes. General Surgery: gall bladders, appendectomies, colon cancer, breast cancer. Dermatology: Acne, melanoma, acne, rash, acne. Neurology: Seizures, MS, Strokes. Even for me, choosing Peds Critical Care is about the broadest variety of pathology I can find, and I'm going to be spending a lot of my time doing cases of diabetic ketoacidosis, respiratory distress, and sepsis...</p>
<p>[/ul]</p>
<p>Those are just a few things, there are definitely more out there. The big thing to remember though is that what is a con for you might not be for someone else and vice versa.</p>
<p>Neurology: seizures, MS, Strokes. You left out the biggie: headaches!!</p>
<p>Hubbell: "how was your day, dad"
Dad: "another 6 women with intractable headaches, shoot me now!"</p>
<p>To me, being a pre-med is also pretty tough. On average, I have 4 hours of class a day, plus 4 hours of work a week, plus 3 or 4 hours of studying per day, and 2 hours of volunteering every week. Plus, I study on weekends.</p>
<p>Thats about 60 or so hours a week, but I'm (usually) enjoying what I do.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Neurology: seizures, MS, Strokes. You left out the biggie: headaches!!</p>
<p>Hubbell: "how was your day, dad"
Dad: "another 6 women with intractable headaches, shoot me now!"
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Oops, you're right...</p>
<p>Actually, most general surgeons love to operate -- appendectomies, gallbladders, colon surgery, breast biopsies are bread and butter cases. What general surgeons hate is paperwork, more paperwork, painful call nights and mindless denials of payment by non-clinicians at insurance companies. Some surgeons like clinic, but most prefer the OR.</p>
<p>For neurologists and ENT's: the dizzy patient workup.</p>
<p>And, yes, there are no duty hour limitations for practicing docs.</p>
<p>$0.02, perhaps I should have been more clear - individuals, as they look toward choosing a specialty, have to find the problem set that they won't mind dealing with day after day after day. The point I was making was that, students often see the spectrum of clinical cases as a high point of medicine, but with the specialization present currently, most of that gets weeded out. When in the "right" specialty, then the bread & butter/mundane is not a problem, but it can be miserable if it's the "wrong" specialty. But if students are expecting a constantly changing case load, full of zebras or even uncommon presentations of common diseases, they're going to be sorely disappointed.</p>
<p>Good point, BRM. </p>
<p>In my field, anesthesia, boring is good. However, an endless stream of similar, mundane cases does not make my job boring: this year I've met a chili cookoff champion, two surfers who well known at two local breaks I've been wanting to try, and a bunch of people who are now very friendly when they see me around town. (And I have done some interesting cases, but interesting in anesthesia usually means stressful for the anesthesiologist or an unfortunate diagnosis for the patient.)</p>
<p>Now if I were stuck in clinic somewhere, no combination of mundane or fantastic cases would me happy.</p>