Applying to uro but having doubts...

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sanfran87

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Hi all,

Like everyone here, I love surgery. I ultimately chose urology for a combination of reasons and am in the process of starting to get the application together. However, I am now having doubts about going into uro (or any surgical field for that matter) because of how easily bored I am. From talking to uro attendings at my institution, most do 1-1.5 days of OR per week and do 2.5-3 days of clinic, with half a day or a full day of "academic time." According to them, this is the minimum amount of clinic they can do because it takes almost 3 days of clinic to support 1 or 1.5 days of OR (pre-op visits, follow-ups, etc.). They have warned me that if I want to go into something where I can easily cut down to 2-3 days of clinical time, uro might not be for me.

My initial plan before M3 was to go into gastro or cards. Many of my MD/PhD mentors in these fields have gradually cut clinical activity down to 1-2 days/week after a few years of attending if their research got more active or if they started working with pharma/device companies or teaching/administration. Some of them have come back to a fuller clinical schedule of 4-5 days/week after they were done with "extracurriculars" and some have even come back after doing 1-2 years of advanced fellowship in their late 40s (one guy did advanced endoscopy in GI, one did nuclear for cards). Jumping around like this honestly sounds very fun to me but I do not know any uro attendings who have done similar things. Many have told me that you cannot do this in anything surgical since you can't just stop operating for a few years and come back since your technical skills quickly deteriorate.

To give a little more background, I was a basic scientist in my past life and loved that there was so much variety and excitement. I was answering new questions every month with experiments and could somewhat easily change my direction if I wasn't having fun anymore, so it was pretty much always fun. I was not that good at it though and there was pretty much no way to have any meaningful patient interaction (volunteering at the hospital pushing wheelchairs did not do it for me) so I decided to go to med school and I do not plan on taking basic science back up.

Is uro not for me? :confused:

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Honestly, there aren't many surgical specialties that don't require you to be in clinic for 2-3 days/week to support 1-1.5 days of OR time. How do you think cases get booked? PCP's send you all sorts of stuff and you figure out who actually needs surgery. Luckily uro clinic is very procedural and you will be able to do lots of in office procedures every day: cystos, TRUS biopsies, vasectomies, urodynamics, etc. If you are interested in research, you should be able to find a urology job that supports that.
 
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if you want to pursue a field where you have 0 clinic and all OR/interventions, go into IR, trauma surgery or intensive care. People usually gravitate to urology because of the nice blend of clinic and OR
 
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