Despite the sky-is-falling opinion that often pervade this discussion board, anesthesiology continues to attract high quality grads. My school has matched 10+ consistently into anesthesia over recent years. Many people that would be competitive for other ROAD and highly competitive specialties have chosen anesthesia. I'm sure that many of you MS4s have as well.
My question, directed at you, is: what is attracting you into anesthesiology despite the foreseeable and present threats?
I've looked at the sticky and read previous posts about others' responses in the past. I'm curious to hear what the incoming class has to say.
I like internal medicine in theory but found it boring in practice (too slow, too much non-medicine stuff to deal with). I like procedures but found actually being scrubbed in on surgery incredibly uninteresting--prefer procedures that involve sticking not cutting and suturing.
Anesthesiology is the only other specialty outside of family practice where one can routinely and comfortably treat children, adults, and pregnant women, and I think that's pretty darned cool. However, family practitioners are not experts in any one thing and that was a big downside for me. Same with emergency medicine. At my school, they liked to claim they were the specialists in resuscitation. Is that why the called anesthesiology not once but twice while I was on my one month rotation during only 14 8-hours shifts to come and manage difficult airways that the EM docs couldn't get?
I like patient contact and quickly ruled out radiology and pathology for that reason but found just enough of the population has strange personalities that I didn't want to follow patients for the rest of their lives or spend my entire day talking with patients. Honestly, I found outpatient clinics exhausting for that reason.
I didn't want to feel obligated to do a fellowship at the end of residency (like I would have if I did internal medicine) but wanted fellowship options to be available and interesting (scratch emergency medicine).
Finally, the ability to have a decent lifestyle and compensation were important. I didn't want to be in residency for 10 years (hello pediatric surgery!), and I wanted to earn more than my lawyer friends made immediately out of law school (bye bye primary care pedatrics). However, these aren't everything and shouldn't be--I would consider radiology to be generally better than anesthesiology at both lifestyle and compensation but wanted to poke my eyes out after sitting in a dark room looking at films for an hour (and then I would have made a pretty lousy radiologist).
So to sum it up--procedures but not surgery, using the foundation of medicine on a regular basis--internal medicine, ability to work with children and pregnant women, availability although not necessity of doing fellowships, patient contact but not too much, expert at something, and ability for good compensation an lifestyle.
Just for balance, I see the big downsides to anesthesiology being turf wars with mid-level providers, laypeople and even other physicians not really understanding what anesthesiologists do, and extremely early hours for the rest of one's career.
