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[rokshana]

Has anyone here ever considered making a decision between the two fields? Are you happy with your choice, and what factors do you think are important to consider? I honestly like both specialties an equal amount and there seems to be quite a bit of overlap in conditions treated. If it's helpful, I'm planning on a career in academic medicine and really like seeing a diversity of conditions and patients (I know that may be asking for too much haha).

first of course is are you competitive for derm?

 

[mszzeta]

Has anyone here ever considered making a decision between the two fields? Are you happy with your choice, and what factors do you think are important to consider? I honestly like both specialties an equal amount and there seems to be quite a bit of overlap in conditions treated. If it's helpful, I'm planning on a career in academic medicine and really like seeing a diversity of conditions and patients (I know that may be asking for too much haha).

The huge advantage for Derm is their high salary (you can say this is for secondary gain). And this is the primarily reason why this is a highly competitive specialty
Both specialty has pretty good lifestyle
Regarding the primary gain, Rheum is overlapped significantly with internal medicine and occasionally manage some really sick and complicated patients (complicated lupus with multi-system involvement, vasculitis, other wired diseases). Both Rheum and derm also manage some boring patients such as low back pain/OA/fibro/gout or simple eczema/acne staff......

 

[mdjo]

I was considering both way back when! Both have similar 9-5 lifestyle once you're in practice and similar length of training (4 years Derm, 5 years Rheum). Derm sees a higher volume of patients (often 1 every 10 minutes, compared with 1 every 20-30 minutes for rheum). This can be a pro for people who like to look at lots of stuff and maybe have a shorter attention span, but on the other hand it means you are going to have more superficial interactions with your patients. Derms also make more money, likely 50-100k more per year. Derms are less likely to deal with patients with life-threatening disease (this would be an every day occurrence in academic rheum, less often in PP rheum). If you stick with academic derm you will see plenty of cool stuff but PP derm honestly seemed too boring for me--too much cosmetics, acne, skin cancer, yawn.
Overall for me personally Rheum is a more rewarding and interesting gig, but the tradeoff is you have to do a medicine residency first and you will make a lot less money over your lifetime.

 

[bronx43]

I thought about derm.





Then I realized I didn't have the scores.

- most medical students