difference between plastics and ortho for hand

[mtheman]

can anyboby tell me the difference(in terms of cases seen) between a hand surgeon who has done a plastics residency/fellowship and one who has done ortho residency and then hand fellowship


any response would be great

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[Plastikos]

One is an ortho surgeon and can also do those procedures and one is a plastic surgeon and can do those procedures as well. If you seriously are only interested in hand, by all means go the ortho route if you are at all interested in ortho just b/c its so much easier to get into.

 

[mcindoe]

Agree with above. I'd add that weekend hand call is often covered by plastics half the time and ortho the other half. As such, ortho and plastics see the same type of cases--this is one of the few areas in plastics that such overlap exists.

Even if you know you want to do a hand fellowship, the path to getting there is much different as you know and shouldn't be decided based on which one is "easier" to get into. Neither is particularly easy to match into. Ortho is just purely musculoskeletal, and you deal with a lot of LOLs ("little old ladies") with broken hips and sports injuries. Plastics is a lot more diverse, but of course I'm very biased. As far as fellowships are concerned, I've noticed that plastics hand fellowships tend to have fellows who were trained in plastics, not ortho. I don't know if it's the same way with the ortho hand fellowships. But I digress...