Mind sharing how you were assured on there being enough "real" medicine? I haven't done my clerkship yet but this is one of my concerns. I don't know if I can "hang up my stethoscope", so to speak.
We seriously need to dispel the myth of the stethoscope.
Has any piece of metal and tubing ever been so overrated as a medical instrument? Unless you're in emergency medicine and actually have to make decisions quickly, it's use is pretty limited:
It's uses include seeing if kids are going to die from sudden death, seeing if a patient is in a funky rhythm while the nurse gets the EKG machine, seeing if you can hear something funny while you wait for the echo to get scheduled, and something for cardiologists to demean you about.
It also lets you know if somebody is taking their asthma meds or whether you can trust the x-ray you're going to order anyway. Oh yeah, and do they need more Lasix or not.
And is their gut working--as if listening tells you so much they couldn't have told you on history? And does that wooshy sound agree with the carotid dopplers you're going to get anyway?*
Compare this to the mental status exam, which has no rival. MRIs don't tell you about mental status, unless their frontal lobe is gone, which does tell you that. And if their EEG shows burst suppression, well yeah. But for the vast vast majority of psychiatry patients, your excellent history and your mental status exam are both forces for which there are no proxies. They are skills that take at least as long to become proficient at as does internal medicine.
You have to give up a lot of what you do in medical school to do any specialty. Surgeons rarely carry around stethoscopes, and can take awfully brief, focused histories. Internal Medicine docs lance a boil and convince themselves they get to do all these awesome procedures when they really just want to play surgeon. OBs don't see dudes. Pediatricians don't see people who can vote.
These are all wonderful specialties, but all require you to give up a large part of the skill set you begin to develop in medical school. Nobody talks about giving up their stethoscope when they go to ophthalmology residency, even though my friends doing ophthy probably won't use their stethoscopes as much as I will in the next four years.
*I'm being entirely facetious. Entirely. Be clear. Not actually knocking medicine. Medicine is awesome, like psychiatry is awesome. But medicine is not awesome the way psychiatry isn't, either.