GI beating cards in competition

[NDESTRUKT]

So I heard the GI match was more competitive than the cards match this year. Is this becoming a trend?

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[kaplan]

I'm not sure you can say one is 'beating' the other. Certainly both are highly competitive, I think probably because of the practice mix of procedures, outpatient, inpatient, not to mention $$. GI is a much smaller field- and the fellowships are all about 1/3 the size of a typical cards fellowship- so this definitely contributes to the competition. I think GI is splitting up into 'medical' and 'procedural' sort of like cards has--- now that the ERCP/EUS (and perhaps even NOTES) training is requiring specific subspecialization.

 

[heartdoc345]

If you can stand the smell of melena every day, then GI is for you.

Don't let competitiveness of the fellowship color the decision of what you want to do.

GI is a great field, and it has a lot of overlap with general medicine, so it's a good fit if you want to do a lot of procedures but still have chronic patients and have to do a lot of detective work. In private practice, it may be possible to do both GI and hepatology. In GI you have to know a lot about cancer, palliative care, nutrition, anemia, infectious diseases, and tidbits of several other medical subspecialties. Plus, you will have close relationships with surgeons, especially if you take care of any post-transplant patients.

However, like the previous poster said, GI is dividing more and more into proceduralists and nonproceduralists. In my residency program, we have few GI docs who do nothing but ERCPs and rarely ever round. I can see the benefits of that lifestyle (no clinic, no chronic patients of your own, more money).