Hey guys,
so I'm just a first year, but my school is all about "exploring specialties early" so I've been doing a lot of that. I currently find that I really like critical care. I was wondering if anyone knew what the differences are between anesthesia critical care and the pulmonology/IM critical care. How are the jobs different (besides working in a SICU instead of a MICU). How are the cases different? Lifestyle? Training? Pay?
Thanks!
To answer your questions first...
How are the cases different? I don't think they have to be different. Some hospitals have one ICU for surgical and non-surgical patients. Thus, theoretically, you can manage the same types of critical patients. The big difference is with the anesthesia route, you can do general anesthesia as part of your practice (3 months out of the year, for example), and that would obviously be a different type of practice than what an internist could do.
Lifestyle? Unfortunately, the answer you'll get is that you can make of it what you want. Again, if you do the anesthesia route, you can set it up such that you do X months of critical care and X months of anesthesia. The anesthesia months should be low stress and fairly good hours. With that said, general internal medicine has the potential for good hours too (the residents do alot of the work, unless you're a hospitalist w/o residents).
Training? anesthesia: 4 years. Medicine 3 years. Anesthesia is overall more competitive to get into, but not terrible. Not sure about the anesthesia CC fellowships, but I know for medicine you can do a 2 or 3 year fellowship (pure CC vs. pulmonary and CC).
Pay? I think the difference in pay will depend on how much general anesthesia vs. general medicine you include in your practice. I would imagine the actual critical care pay would be similar (although I have no evidence).
If you noticed, I almost make the assumption that CC docs always do some other "general" work in their practice. This is based on what ONE 3rd year medicine resident told me. He happened to be interested in CC, but he chose to do an anesthesia residence (after completing his medicine residency) and then do a CC fellowship. His reasoning was that you burn out too quickly if you do 12 months of straight up CC, and he preferred doing general anesthesia in his "alternate" time as opposed to general medicine.
I hope this helps