In a survey of radiation oncologists, dealing with the constant death of patients was ranked as the #1 drawback from the career.
This is the good part.
Other specialists (for example surgeons) probably complained more often about their crappy life style and working hours, while family doctors probably complained about their bad payment.
So in radiation oncologist you have the major drawback, that everything else simply rocks so that the biggest drawback is seeing patients die.
So your life is basically fine, but what bugs you the most are your patients' fortunes.
Now this is what I call a true doctor!
One that worries more about his/her patients than himself/herself.
I find it odd that you compare the experience a family care physician has with death to that of a radiation oncologist.
I agree with you on that.
As a family care physician you care patients for decades, get to know them well, perhaps even get friends with them and then have to see how they miserably die with multiple brain metastasis from NSCLC. And then it strikes you, that you may have taken care of these patients for decades, but you never managed to persuade them stop smoking. FAILURE!
That's an exaggerated example here, but not all of our patients in radiation oncology die. The key point is being "prepared". In radiation oncology you know, that every single one of your patients (excluding the 5% treated for benign diseases) can potentially die because of cancer.
So you know what you are dealing with.
It's a new way of thinking.
As a colleague of mine once said concerning a patient with breast cancer and negative staging for metastatic disease: "We cannot saythat the patient has no metastases. We can simply say, that her metastases are too small to be detected by imaging."
This is how you learn to think in radiation oncology. Every patient, regardless of how small his/her primary tumour is and how good his/her prognosis is, has the potential to die of cancer.
You simply know what you have to deal with. Every single day.
You cite pediatricians and other doctors who too must watch patients die...for them these are all the type of stories they remember. Particular cases in a vast career of other cases.
And that's the bad part about it. Because they are all unprepared.
For cancer, they're all dying, and usually fast.
Not everyone dies of cancer. We do cure a sizable portion of our patients.
A significant amount of the care patients will receive and pay for is in the final year of life.
And it is our job to make that final year as comfortable as we can for the patients. Comforting pain, avoiding complications and often extending survival in the palliative setting is a major task for radiation oncologists.
And we can be proud of fulfilling that task, whenever we can.
