Deployment tempo for USAF aerospace medicine.

[milmed14]

Thinking about making the jump to the dark side. Getting kinda jaded with elderly patients who could not care less about their health, DHA constantly trying to jam more work into a day, and the whole individual augmentee format of deployments for family medicine.

However, my family doesn’t do great with deployments. The kids just can’t quite adjust and do very poorly in school when I’m gone even with a heroic effort by my spouse.

Anyone have some insights into the deployment tempo for aerospace medicine as a whole, and perhaps even if there are locations that might be less intense than others.

I am on the back half of my career where deployments should be less frequent, and am wary of my skills going to crap by only seeing young/healthy/compliant patients, but DHA over watch seems worse.

Any advice is appreciated.

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[DrMetal]

Thinking about making the jump to the dark side. Getting kinda jaded with elderly patients who could not care less about their health, DHA constantly trying to jam more work into a day, and the whole individual augmentee format of deployments for family medicine.

However, my family doesn’t do great with deployments. The kids just can’t quite adjust and do very poorly in school when I’m gone even with a heroic effort by my spouse.

Anyone have some insights into the deployment tempo for aerospace medicine as a whole, and perhaps even if there are locations that might be less intense than others.

I am on the back half of my career where deployments should be less frequent, and am wary of my skills going to crap by only seeing young/healthy/compliant patients, but DHA over watch seems worse.

Any advice is appreciated.

What service are you, and what specialty? And how much more time do you currently owe? You're still seeing elderly patients, in an MTF? My local MTF has been completely gutted. Everyone >65yo has been deferred to the network.

edit: saw your FM and USAF. I don't know about the AF, but Aerospace medicine (in the Navy) is considered very operational, very deployable. It's also mostly mind-numbering nothing-burger medicine. Your skills will definitely attrite. And so I'd avoid it.

If you're done being in the military (deployments etc), and that's totally fine, best to just serve out the rest of your contract and GTFO.