Neuro drought?

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DrStraggler

DrStraggler

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I'm in a summer premed program and today we were going over a general review of various specialties and neurology came up. It's well paid, manageable hours and caters towards a long and meaningful patient doctor relationship. So I'm kind of at a loss to understand why it's not a more competitive or sought after residency choice. Any thoughts?
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DrStraggler said:
I'm in a summer premed program and today we were going over a general review of various specialties and neurology came up. It's well paid, manageable hours and caters towards a long and meaningful patient doctor relationship. So I'm kind of at a loss to understand why it's not a more competitive or sought after residency choice. Any thoughts?
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im sry soliciting a prostitute does not count as medical experience
 
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(I haven't hit clinicals yet, so please don't take this as gospel. just my take on it) The pro's you listed are spot on, but some people don't like the cons:

1. Only relatively recently have we started to see treatments that can actually yield benefit to patients involved in neurology. Only in the last 12-13 years have we developed any good treatments for stroke, for example. Before it was kind of diagnose and watch.

2. A couple of the common diseases are terminal and involve protracted, horrible declines in quality of life. Take for instance MS, Parkinson's, Huntingtons, and Alzheimers. We can do some things for these diseases now, but they pretty much all involve huge declines in function until complete dependence on other's for the most basic of functions.

3. Pay in comparison to other specialties.

4. The stereotype of them being armchair philosopher's and not "do'ers" (not as true anymore.)
 
That really smart asian kid who went to uchicago who gradauated med school at 22 went into neurology (peds).
 
I am not aware of any peds neuro residencies. I am actually working for a pediatric neurologist who did peds residency + neuro fellowship. I suspect there is also a neuro residency and peds fellowship option.

anyone know if there is a 1 stop shop for this sort of thing? My instincts say no
 
SpecterGT260 said:
I am not aware of any peds neuro residencies. I am actually working for a pediatric neurologist who did peds residency + neuro fellowship. I suspect there is also a neuro residency and peds fellowship option.

anyone know if there is a 1 stop shop for this sort of thing? My instincts say no
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Here's a thread that has a pretty decent answer. Looks like you do a 2 year peds prelim and then 3 year neuro but they just switched it up recently from basically just matching to peds for 2 years, dropping out and then doing neuro...probably was pissing a lot of programs off.l

http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?t=928834
 
tiedyeddog said:
(I haven't hit clinicals yet, so please don't take this as gospel. just my take on it) The pro's you listed are spot on, but some people don't like the cons:

1. Only relatively recently have we started to see treatments that can actually yield benefit to patients involved in neurology. Only in the last 12-13 years have we developed any good treatments for stroke, for example. Before it was kind of diagnose and watch.

2. A couple of the common diseases are terminal and involve protracted, horrible declines in quality of life. Take for instance MS, Parkinson's, Huntingtons, and Alzheimers. We can do some things for these diseases now, but they pretty much all involve huge declines in function until complete dependence on other's for the most basic of functions.

3. Pay in comparison to other specialties.

4. The stereotype of them being armchair philosopher's and not "do'ers" (not as true anymore.)
Click to expand...

This. I think lots of people are turned off by neuro just because there's still so little you can do in comparison to other specialities...a lot of diseases are just working on quality of life issues. Even with stroke the outcomes are all over the place and its kind of hit or miss on an individual basis whether a procedure works or not. Also, all the "cool" stuff gets done by neurosurgery although neurologists are trying to break into the procedural area a little more.
 
Neurology has become something of a dumping ground for chronic patients with permanent stable disability (if they're lucky) or soul-crushing progressive deterioration (if they're not). Epileptic patients are the exception, although the occasional success in seizure management is hardly exciting enough to compensate for a career apologizing to patients that we have no effective way to stop your horrible, horrible disease.

The detailed neurologic exam used to be a small piece of wizardry that was highly effective in localizing lesions, but has become sadly obsolete with CT and MRI.

The only two bright spots I see in neurology is pedi neuro (very interesting mix of problems, many of which are reversible or manageable if caught early) and neuro critical care - outcomes aren't great, but very interesting if you like critical care but can't stand a neurosurgery residency. Don't go into neurology thinking you'll be a interventional neuroradiologist/neurosurgeon, it's possible but extremely difficult given a lack of procedural training in neurology residency and a general bias against neurologists among program directors.

P.S. - compared to most specialties, it is not well paid.
 
Pay comes up in almost every neuro thread. Last time I remember checking neuro was like mid-200s average right? So yeah not awesome when compared to other specialities but considering its fairly easy to match (from what I've heard) compared to most other specialties I'd probably be more concerned about the soul-crushing neurological illness aspect than the pay aspect. Am I right or am I missing something?
 
I'm interested in Neurology, but neurologists don't really "cure" their patients. They just try to make life less miserable. Neurological disorders are very difficult to treat.

As a doctor I would like to see my patients improve, not stay the same.

I view it kind of like oncology. I know so many people who's lives have been ruined because a loved one developed cancer and it drained their finances. I'd be crying everyday.

Am I too soft to be a physician?lol
 
iqe2010 said:
I'm interested in Neurology, but neurologists don't really "cure" their patients. They just try to make life less miserable. Neurological disorders are very difficult to treat.

As a doctor I would like to see my patients improve, not stay the same.

I view it kind of like oncology. I know so many people who's lives have been ruined because a loved one developed cancer and it drained their finances. I'd be crying everyday.

Am I too soft to be a physician?lol
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I would venture to say neurology is worse than oncology in that aspect. Oncology as a field moves fairly quickly and we can put cancers into remission now that we couldn't even do anything about years ago. There are just a lot of people who have SOME kind of cancer (as one of my profs put it everyone gets cancer if you live long enough) so there are a lot of good stories and a lot of bad ones. Sure if you get someone with Stage IV colon cancer the story doesn't look good but you can also catch a lot of people early on and do something about it. It also depends on the type of oncology you go into.

In neuro you can see people who you know for a fact are going to do nothing but lose their motor reflexes slowly over the years becoming dependent on someone else for basically everything until they can't even eat or breathe on their own anymore and die. You know this for a fact and can do essentially nothing to stop it. It's basically kind of like catching someone with stage 0 breast cancer and then just saying "well sorry you're probably gonna die within five years and there's nothing we can do about it". It's not that you're catching it too late in these cases its just that you can actually do nothing at all to meaningfully slow or stop the disease.
 
SpecterGT260 said:
I am not aware of any peds neuro residencies. I am actually working for a pediatric neurologist who did peds residency + neuro fellowship. I suspect there is also a neuro residency and peds fellowship option.

anyone know if there is a 1 stop shop for this sort of thing? My instincts say no
Click to expand...

There are several Child Neurology residency programs, often at big name institutions (Mass Gen, Hopkins, Wash U, etc).
 
As one who works in Pediatric Neurology studying headache, I can say that it is pretty depressing how Neurologists can't really do anything. That being said, they are definitely trying, and are trying to cure epilepsy, apraxia, etc.

Regards,
Vlad
 
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