Mr hawkings said:
Hello, i am a med school applicant and i was wondering if anyone has an answer to a couple of questions:
first, has anyone ever heard of someone that did their residency in something surgery or something else unrelated to internal medicine and then did an infectious disease fellowship? please let me know if this would even be possible or if you HAVE to do internal medicine to do that as a sub-specialty.
Also, is it possible for somesone with just an MD (withour pHd) to do research on something unrelated to their specialty.
my problem is that i am interested in general surgery as a specialty but i also want to pursue my research interests (malaria vaccine development). with these two conflicting interests, i've been told that if i dont do MD-pHD, i'll have to pick one and forget about a carreer in the other.
any comments?
please help
I have no input as to the possibility of the combination you suggest, but as augmel points out there is a lot of variability in the exact career paths people take. As such, I would agree, most things are technically "possible" - but I would question the likelihood of the exact combination you suggest (and it may be simply that I am missing a connection here that is obvious).
However, in the examples augmel cites I can think of some fairly obvious overlaps or reasons for those people to do ID eg a neurologist specializing in treating (or a research interest in) patients with neurological disorders of an ID origin eg HIV+ patients with AIDS dementia complex, herpes simplex, varicella-zoster, CMV, toxoplasmosis, or tuberculous meningitis, postinfectious encephalomyelitis, etc etc.
Similarly I can think of some slightly less obvious but still reasonable connections for an OB-GYN (especially relating to HIV+ mothers).
So in either of these situations the doctor would be able to easily combine both interests because, in reality, they would largely be one and the same, and they would have a large patient population to draw on, daily experience in both, would not need to seek an academic appointment spanning two disparate areas, etc
With surgery there are also areas that have obvious overlaps. However, I can't really see how general surgery could be combined with, specifically, malaria vaccine development. But as I said it may just be my myopia (even stretching the best I can come up with is - are you planning doing surgery in another country where malaria is common?). Otherwise, as I see it, your patient population as a general surgeon would not have anything in common, or even be the ideal 'test-population', for such a vaccine trial. And if you mean basic-science drug development that really is a completely different area. So if you can't combine them you would have to pretty much do both part-time, requiring a rather unusual cross-department academic appointment. In addition, neither basic vaccine-development nor general surgery are usually "part-time" professions - to be a researcher doing vaccine development you need funding, which requires publications and a strong track record, all of which requires considerable time committment.
If there is an overlap and I've missed it then obviously I am wrong - and good luck. But if there isn't I think you may end up having to make a choice between these two passions as although it may be possible, I would suspect it would be so insurmountably difficult as to make it extremely unlikely. Either way, as a pre-med, you still have a long way to go till you need to make such a choice so I would suggest just keeping an open mind and seeing how things work out. Just my opinion, your mileage may vary....
