cryogen9 said:
He's right. Better life, easier more grateful patients, better hours, nicer life especially a few years out. Residency ends in ophth. it never ends in gen surgery. You'' never regret the happy specialty--the eyes have it!!
I did Gen Surgery as an intern. Because I had a compulsory assignment as a military flight surgeon/GMO after that, I had some time to think. I had liked my ophthalmology clerkships and eventually did decide to apply. I did my residency after finishing my military obligations. I don't regret that decision.
That being said, the life is different. You will spend relatively less time in the OR as an ophthalmologist than do most general surgeons. You will also treat less sick patients, on the whole, which is the nature of treating a generally elective and non-emergent caseload. It is a bad day when one of your postop patients goes to the unit. Most of them are supposed to go right home.
A busy surgical schedule requires a busy office schedule. So you will have to expect to spend the majority of your practice time in the office seeing patients. Even in a highly streamlined practice setting, with a referral stream from a primary eyecare base of optometrists feeding you cases, you will still be committed to substantial office time: true for retina, general, peds, plastics, glaucoma and even refractive. Every cataract case needs a preop visit (or two), and usually a one-day, one week and one month followup, and sometimes a three-month followup. So you can see that the numbers of office encounters is a significant multiple of the numbers of surgeries you do. Ophthalmologists typically do many more surgeries in a given day than do most general surgeons (scopes and simple breast biopsies excepted), so the office load is proportionally greater. A busy office schedule for a single doctor can exceed 50 patients a day. Doing that well requires trained support staff, which costs money. Office overhead is a significant cost to ophthalmology practice.
The hours are definitely easier, so is the call.
Are patients grateful? Probably. Most are having scheduled procedures and are not seriously ill as are many general surgery patients. Cataract surgery still has a "wow" factor, although generally patient expectations have been steadily rising and in some places have reached nearly the level of those for refractive procedures. And this while reimbursement from Medicare for cataract extraction and lens implant has declined sharply. So stress is a little greater.
