Hand Surgery

It really depends on where you will be practicing, as with nearly all specialties in surgery. In a metropolitan area, you will be competing with plastic surgeons trained in the hand and the orthopaedic surgeons who do hand. If you worked in smaller cities or places where there are less specialists, you could make a good living just doing the hand.

I was placed with an orthopaedic hand surgeon for a while and I asked him for some info on the field. Surg4me is right, where you practice counts for a lot. The surgeon I was with did private work in his area because he was the only hand specialist there. He said that the money in hand surgery (for orthopaedics) wasn’t as good as other subspecialties (like knee or spine) but he was still earning the same (maybe even more) than the general surgeons. Whether or not you want to do “other things” depends on you. The surgeon I was with ran one hand clinic and one general trauma (e.g. Fractures) clinic so he did both hand surgery and general orthopaedics. I personally think this is better as I found that a single subspecialty in ortho gets quite repetitive.

General Surgery is 5+ years (+ extra years in the lab if you should choose to do so, or are expected to do so). A Hand fellowship is generally 1 year although some will offer an extended "super fellowship" year for research or extra experience. If you then wanted to do a Sports Medicine fellowship you could, but it will NOT qualify you to do more ortho procedures. These fellowships are generally geared toward Family Practitioners and do not generally give you surgical experience other than simple reductions and in-office fracture management.

If you want to do Ortho, and not just Hand, you'll need to do an Ortho residency. However, at this point just concentrate on getting into medical school and doing the best you can; the rest will sort itself out (ie, you may be competitive for Ortho, if that's what you really want to do, gen Surg may become more or less competitive, etc.)