Um, no it isn't. O stands for Ophtho and the OP is 100% correct. Back then IM and General Surgery were the most competitive. Ortho was for people who were "bottom of the class".
Well that's embarrassing. Thanks for clarifying.
Oh I agree with you. It's definitely not on par with what is traditionally considered good lifestyle (9-5, no pager, etc.). I guess it probably has one of the better ones considering it's a surgical specialty. A knee or hip replacement are no joke to do, I'm sure as far as manual labor and time. I'm just saying their usually elective surgeries so relatively controlled.
Lifestyle in ortho is highly dependent on your practice from what I have seen. Even the sports/joints guys at my institution are in the trauma call rotation.
Yes, I'm referring the ones who limit their practice to those elective surgeries and in Ortho you can.
Yeah, I'm not gonna do that.
Perhaps I was a bit too quick to respond. Just didn't have enough time to read through that beast of a thread just yet. Seems there's plenty of snark to go around SDN already, didn't mean to add to it. Mea culpa.
I agree with you that ortho is a great specialty - a lot of my friends are ortho residents, and they're all great people. I would challenge your broad statement that "ortho has you operating more than any other surgical specialty." As far as the trauma goes, sure I would put ortho up there in one of the top slots, and ortho residents definitely put in long hours on call. But as far as the general operating experience, where I am Gen Surg (really mostly the vascular and transplant surgeons), Neurosurgery, ENT, and plastics are all operating more than orthopedics. Between scheduled cases, head/spine trauma and head bleeds, I'm pretty sure our neurosurgeons spend the most amount of time over the course of 24 hours in the OR. For the general operating day, ENT is usually the first in the OR and the last to leave, especially when flap cases are going.
So you're using sheer case numbers to judge how often residents are in the OR. At my program the graduating chiefs usually have between 2400-3000 cases logged. I think I had over 500 cases logged as a PGY-2 alone. But if you are only using cases logged, you have to account for the fact of the wide disparity of cases. A bronch takes 30-60 seconds, a set of tubes takes 6-7 minutes to put in, etc. whereas a composite resection with bilateral neck dissections and a free flap takes all day to perform. At the end of the day, you get the same number of cases logged for doing a composite resection, bilateral neck dissections, and free flap (4) as you do for doing 4 sets of tubes (maybe an hour and a half in the OR with turnover times). So trying to use case numbers to account for time spent in the operating room doesn't tell the whole story of how much a resident is operating. I don't know what the minutes spent in OR is for our adult hospitals, but I do know that at our pediatric hospital Neurosurg, Peds Surg, and ENT are the three highest in terms of actual time spent in the operating room.
Nope, not Gen Surg, subspecialty 🙂 Those numbers aren't abnormal; like I said, they can range from really small quick cases to all day long cases, which is why I personally don't put a whole lot of stock in them; I know there are multiple papers published on the subject, but just from personal experience I don't think case number is a great predictor of how good a resident is in the OR, and I think I would have several attendings back me up on this. I do have a tremendous amount of respect for my gen surg peers, though; I have great respect for all of my surgical peers, be it GS, ortho, neurosurg, urology, ENT, plastics, vascular, CT, OMFS, whatever. We're all in this together. The goal is to be happy with what you're doing, and it sounds like KinasePro is excited to be ortho, which is great, because when my knees finally go later in life, I'd rather have the orthopedic surgeon who loves his profession doing my surgery rather than the guy who's just trying to get through the day.
Nope, not Gen Surg, subspecialty 🙂 Those numbers aren't abnormal; like I said, they can range from really small quick cases to all day long cases, which is why I personally don't put a whole lot of stock in them; I know there are multiple papers published on the subject, but just from personal experience I don't think case number is a great predictor of how good a resident is in the OR, and I think I would have several attendings back me up on this. I do have a tremendous amount of respect for my gen surg peers, though; I have great respect for all of my surgical peers, be it GS, ortho, neurosurg, urology, ENT, plastics, vascular, CT, OMFS, whatever. We're all in this together. The goal is to be happy with what you're doing, and it sounds like KinasePro is excited to be ortho, which is great, because when my knees finally go later in life, I'd rather have the orthopedic surgeon who loves his profession doing my surgery rather than the guy who's just trying to get through the day.
