A Crisis of Trust Between U.S. Medical Education and the NBME

[Matthew9Thirtyfive]

Guess we will have to agree to disagree. The people I know going into surgery love the salaries and it is a large motivator.

I think the evidence supports that as well, seeing as neurosurgery is relatively noncompetitive in many EU countries where the pay is equivocal.

We don’t really have to agree to disagree. How many people could we possibly know? A small fraction of the overall population of surgeons/people going into surgery. When you are looking at a small sample size, you are more likely to see extreme results, so it doesn’t really surprise me that most of the ones you know are chasing $$$ while most of the ones I know just love the OR.

We’d have to look at a large, representative sample to really know what the overall consensus is (if there is one).

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[slowthai]

I know an ophthalmologist who doesn’t think of himself as a surgeon lol.

It appears that ophtho is in a bit of a grey area. They can do non-surgical prelims (no other surgical field allows that), but they can also do oculoplastic surgery and facial trauma recon.

 

[Matthew9Thirtyfive]

It appears that ophtho is in a bit of a grey area. They can do non-surgical prelims (no other surgical field allows that), but they can also do oculoplastic surgery and facial trauma recon.

Yeah I mean anyone that can enucleate an eyeball is a surgeon to me.

 

[Med Ed]

 

[njtrimed]

You’re moving the goalposts.

Most of the surgeons I know or people going into surgery would do it even if the pay were the same. In fact for many of the people I’m talking about, the pay won’t be that much different from their medicine colleagues because we all make the same base pay in the military and the bonuses are not tremendously different compared to civilian world. You might make 30k more as a surgeon for example.

That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t also be happy in another procedural specialty (or even a non-procedural one), but that wasn’t exactly the argument.

Absolutely. Starting med school as an older student with a family, I tried to convince myself to anything BUT surgery. By match day, I was joking that if I didn’t match surgery, I’d rather go back to working as a surgical technologist than round all day.

Guess we will have to agree to disagree. The people I know going into surgery love the salaries and it is a large motivator.

I think the evidence supports that as well, seeing as neurosurgery is relatively noncompetitive in many EU countries where the pay is equivocal.

I’m not sure what kind of background you have other than anecdotes from what you perceive of your classmates, but I worked in the OR for nearly two decades, with hundreds of surgeons and trainees. Some of them may have complained about their lives and how hard they work, but I think the majority that pursue it for the wrong reasons ultimately don’t finish a surgery residency. Maybe that’s why the attrition rate is high; it’s not worth pursuing it unless you love it. You can make money elsewhere if that’s your goal.

I can tell you that a few months into intern year with young kids at home, I love what I am doing and could not imagine doing anything else. As expected, I’m not in the OR much, and I assumed all the floor work and crazy q4 calls of intern year were something I just had to suck it up and survive, but I am actually enjoying it and not just “surviving it.” I wouldn’t trade what I’m doing for anything else. Seems like my co-interns feel the same way.