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Popularity of Anesthesia


Guest Ian Wong

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Guest Ian Wong

Was Anesthesia really popular last year? Isn't it one of the least popular in the U.S. (highest IMG %)? Why the disparity do you think?

 

 

I edited your message to include a more descriptive subject. -Ian

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Guest Jimbo

Thanks Ian, I titled it '?' because I thought I was replying to the post below. Felt like a nimrod.

 

btw, do you feel like taking a stab at the question?

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Guest Ian Wong

Anesthesia was the specialty that increased the most in popularity during last year's match, if I recall correctly. Even in the US, it's a medium-weight specialty to get into; certainly not one of the least popular.

 

The appeal of Anesthesia can be approached from several directions.

 

The first is that one doesn't need an office to practise, and therefore automatically avoids the hassles of maintaining an office and staffing headaches, as well as the significant bite in overhead costs that office physicians must pay out of their salary. As a result, this specialty is also very portable. Don't want to practise in a certain city? You can just pick up and move, unlike an office physician who is tied down. This is a big reason why other hospital-based specialties like Emerg or Radiology are popular as well.

 

In addition, the ability to not carry patients means never having to wake up and be at the hospital early in the morning to round on all of your inpatients before you start your day's work. If you work in an area where you don't have residents to round on your patients in the morning, then you the doctor are going to have to do it, and this means early mornings!

 

As well, the work itself can be very routine at times, but to be a good anesthesiologist requires an extremely broad knowledge base which is sort of a composite of internal medicine, Emerg/Critical care work, and physiology/pharmacology. If you think about how much knowledge an internal medicine doctor must know to manage a patient with long-standing diabetes, is a chronic smoker, and takes multiple medications, and you then subject this patient to the stresses of surgery, you now have an anesthesiologist. You need to be alert and ready to react to any sudden changes of the patient due perhaps to the patient's intrinsic sickness, or perhaps an error on the surgeon's behalf.

 

I've heard anesthesiology as being described as hours of boredom punctuated by seconds of sheer terror.

 

Anesthesiologists can also work as ICU physicians or subspecialize into pain fellowships.

 

The hours are often shiftwork just like Emergency Medicine, and the call schedule may be quite light depending on how many other anesthesiologists are available to do night call, and how many surgeries your hospital might potentially perform at night.

 

It's a really cool specialty, with an enormous knowledge base to master. There's lots of hands-on work in prepping patients for various procedures. Add to that a very competitive salary combined with no office overhead or need to carry a steady patient base, as well as often quite predictable hours, and you have the makings of a popular specialty.

 

Ian

UBC, Med 3

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