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Sneezing

Even Bears do it!
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Ever wonder why psychiatry, a speciality that is like 1%-4% of the physician specialties seems to mostly have a disproportionate number of viewers on the forum?:confused:

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I never bothered to read the numbers on the the people who view the forums much outside of psychiatry.

But I have noticed that it seems a lot of people that are not mental health professionals read the forum based on the occasional but consistent number of people posting about their experiences as a patient.

I also noticed that when I type something into google related to psychiatry, the SDN psychiatry forum pops up pretty high on the list if not #1. Most people check out the #1 hit.
 
I've started noticing that, too. SDN didn't used to be a top google return on searches.
 
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We do probably get the highest amount of non-medical provider traffic based on all the random psychiatry rants that pop up here.

Personally I lurk on the surgery forum. I'm just kind of fascinated by people actually committing to and doing something like a surgery residency. Seems like torture. Why?
 
Aside that surgery itself can be fascinating, IMHO it's overachiever syndrome.

Personally, I liked surgery. I used to be an illustrator, and I love building models. The same type of zen peace I attained from the two hobbies were also attained during surgery. The problem, however, being that anything 80 hours a week is overkill. After 55-60 hours a week of psychiatry, it starts becoming cumbersome, and I start becoming irritable.

Where I went to college, if you had 100 pre-law people be in a class where the average grade on an exam was 40%, the overwhelming majority would start a petition about how it's unfair, possibly even racist, sexist, what have you.

The premed people took a bite out of the dung sandwich and without literally doing it, asked for more. While the pre-law may have been an overreaction, The premed people didn't seem to be fazed by the fact that the exam may have actually by statistical measures not been valid or reliable, they were getting destroyed at worst, at best had to put a lot more work in to understand the stuff than was needed because professors were bad teachers and test graders.

If you take a look at the demographics of people in medschool, they are more often from cultures where self-denial of pleasure is more commonplace.

Hey, if someone wants to work to the point where his wife is cheating on him with the AC repairman, doesn't know his kids, ends up paying his wife half his salary after she's left him, and not have a proper night of sleep for the rest of his life because it will somehow justify his manhood more power to him. He can balk at me all he wants about how surgery is tougher than psychiatry while he wears his scrubs he's had on for 48 hours straight. I'll agree with him, sit back, take a sip of a drink, pretend to play a violin, and tell him how I'm going to a high end restaurant that night.

I'm still going to write on his BS psychiatry consult requests: No need for psychiatric intervention.
 
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I know that a lot of the Psychology forumites read this board, myself included. Not sure if that explains all of the numbers, though.

As for surgery, one of my relatives (now out of residency) was going to pursue it, but it was just too cutthroat for him. Ended up going internal medicine instead.
 
Maybe because Psych residents have more downtime than residents in other fields. Its hard to post on a message board when you are in surgery 14 hours a day and don't have time to eat or sleep. Just a thought.
 
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