I should add I have been seeing a lot of PM&R sports docs getting burnt out. Not fun to do unpaid week night and weekend coverage for sports, see 40 patient a day with only a handful are athletes and the rest are OA, get paid less than 250k in bigger towns and no chance of becoming a voting partner. Most sports fellows don't know the reality of non academic private practice sports med.
Well how many folks out there really cover sports team.
Sports pm&r under ortho practice is literally side kicks to ortho. pm&r has been trying to look legit by using ultrasound guided injections and at aapmr workshop is all ultrasound work shop that is not that special. In ortho practice, once u hold ultrasound dildo probe, you get referals to inject on obese patients(non operable for knees and hip replacement due to bmi)whom ortho do not feel like to inject and those patients will come back every three month and you have to drag those patients under your panel. The glory for three months(injection supposedly last three months?!) get shorter and shorter !!! On the top of that u have to get consents and check hga1c in some cases and be careful with blood thinner. If you have MA or PAs or NPs who look out those things, those are lucky ones. What is likely chance that provate ortho practice gives u PAs to help you?!?!On the top of that ortho will use ultrasound dildo folks to see if hip injection works or not and they will take the glory by providing hip replacement. Imagine it is like that everyday! I would rather do quick consults and leave.
To residents out there, do not choose fellowship because you like doing procedures! Thise bread and butter procedures u end up doing as sports pm&r will be too repetitious and those patients will love u but they will overburden you
To those in real world who like doing injections that is fine but i am being subjective indeed. Residents and medical students need to Look at the subspecialty of pm&r as whole. What kind of patient population would u rather handle for your rest of life???
Sports and pain fellowship are still sought after. I will choose pain fellowship in a second. I would rather do non accredited sports spine over pure sports medicine in a second. Sports procedures do not need fellowships but pain fellowship obviously offer procedures skills that gen pm&r and only sports trained pm&r cannot do. I am aware that spors pmr fellowship offers opportunities to do spine procedures but which employer in competitive market will believe that??
I will not disclose what i do. U can guess I am also a sidekick to ortho and neurosurg
However, huge portions of my panels are just not good surgical candidates to begin with and i have own niche(i work for hmo btw) and no one in my hmo and in my regions can do what i can do. In that regards i am not getting burned out.
I admit the survey results posted above sound true. Dealing with bureaucracy with mysterious specialty background can boil folks and burn out to fume! I am in geographical area that private practices barely make living. So i am stuck in HMO. What keeps me going is building good relationship with other specialty colleagues and let them know what you do and draw respectful boundaries. I am surviving
