First of all this isn't about money or prestige; this is about enjoying my work. I am currently a seventh grade science teacher who wants to pursue a more analytically driven profession. I have had a passion for science and contemplated this endeavor for quite sometime. One of the main factors in my decision is what profession offers more interaction with people/coworkers and more excitement.
For example, I would like to work at a hospital with a large staff, instead of working with a small business filled with assistants and admins, but I do want to have a regular lifestyle. Are any medical specialties or dental specialties that allow for this type of lifestyle?
Can an Oral Surgeon own his own practice and work as a contractor at a hospital?
I do know that I would want to work with the teeth/face/heart/pulmonology.
From my understanding, what you want in a career is of three categories: 1) intellectually stimulation, 2) interpersonal interaction, and 3) variety or "excitement."
I feel that there are far more complex and interesting cases in medicine than in dentistry. The cases you encounter in medicine are presented in a set of symptoms that you analyze with diagnostics that you preform on your own or refer to others specialists or labs for more detailed tests and from this information you would ultimately match to a diagnosis and then follow protocol. I believe that the only form of pleasure that I would find in this process, aside from developing doctor-patient trust and getting a "feel-good" feeling from racking up karma points, is the sense of accomplishment upon reaching a diagnosis. To me the feeling that I would get would be similar to the one I get immediately after solving sudoku, math, or crosswords puzzles. This is a terrible analogy and probably an incorrect one because reaching a diagnosis can also be extremely stressful at times because you're dealing with peoples lives and not trivial games and after years of experience, various clinical aspects will become very remedial and look more like paperwork than medicine.
Dentistry is at the other spectrum of hitting pleasure centers. In this field, you are not given ambiguous symptoms left for you to organize, interpret, and diagnose as in medicine. Instead, you are limited to the oral cavity and most of the problems you encounter in patients are visual and aside from X-rays do not require other diagnostics and have relatively straight-forward solutions. But these straight-forward solutions may be very "technical" and require difficult surgical operations. These solutions are generally more rapid and more visually drastic and apparent than the solutions you would generally achieve in internal medicine where weeks may go by before patients appear any better (not OB/GYN, surgery, EM, etc.). By building an improved smile, you are able to hit pleasure centers that are similar to the ones you get from playing tetris or fixing a car.
Sorry for these terrible analogies but I'm trying to find things relate-able to most people.
I enjoy both pleasures that I would receive from medicine and dentistry but I know that ever since I was child I loved playing with legos, watching my dad fix cars as an auto-body mechanic, and building the most random things in my garage. Since I really enjoyed these things as a child and still do, I think practicing dentistry would translate into the same pleasures I received as a build o' maniac as a child. As an aside, I began my fascination with science with a story about my fallen baby tooth and a milk commercial which I won't get into.
For interpersonal interactions, I think you are afforded more time with patients as a dentist not only because dental patients have been conditioned to visit the dentist at least twice a year but because dentists tend to have more time to spend with the patient than most hospital physicians do (not family physicians) who are subjected to a rigid schedule provided by the hospital and not by the physician. Dentist also have rigid schedules but at least dentists have more control and can decide how many patient they want to a receive in a given day.
As far as excitement goes, this will vary from person to person but generally, medicine offers more excitement just due to the variety of cases, the existence of emergency medicine, and maybe the lack of control. I know some psychiatrists believe that the rush you get from emergency medicine wears off after a while: skip to 1:37 in this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZO4...DvjVQa1PpcFMlXGcxRCQ2MMeQg7HTX62dEkAsa1aevhg=.
With dentistry there are less areas where one might get excited. You might get something as interesting (more funny than interesting) as this case,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1080847.
In my interpretation of medicine, medicine aims to prolong life-spans and save lives.
Dentistry generally improves one's lifestyle either by restoring oral function or enhancing smiles and other features that are intimately related to one's face and self-esteem. The good kind of arousal is rejuvenation and creativity. Creativity is one of the cores in dentistry and may only be found in medicine if you conduct research or perform superficial reconstruction.
Anyways, I think OMFS is a good conglomerate of medicine and dentistry. It even says so after OMFS' surgeon's names with DDS + MD. I can't imagine how awesome it would be to fix a little girl's cleft palate and see her smile.
