My guy, I admire your savvy, but you realize “learn to fly so you can commute to a good job” is an absolutely insane suggestion for 99.99% of radoncs right? If anything, it shows how terrible this field has become.
Can get a linac cheaper than an airplane
Programs are still adding spots?? That’s a whole new level of ignorance…
forums.studentdoctor.net
greed, not ignorance. And these same people are by and large running astro. "Leadership" are bad apples and will screw the specialty for their own benefit whether it is resident numbers, payment reform etc. J Michalski from wash u increased resident numbers a year or 2 ago
Lets not be the fools here. Lessons were learned. Expansion provides short term benefits to programs and makes SOM administration happy. With essentially no immediate downside to department leadership."No lessons learned"
For more info:
Programs that have increased/decreased resident numbers and closed 2019 to 2024
Programs that have closed with approved resident spots prior to withdrawal of accreditation; Drexel in 2019 (4), Medical College of Georgia in 2019 (4), California Pacific in 2019 (4) Cornell 2021 (6), NCI in 2023 (6) and University of Tennessee in 2024 (4). Programs to have officially...
i dont disagree, but this applies to all specialties. I am interested in why radiation is uniquely the worst? I guess by definition, one specialty has to be the absolute worst/greediest/self interested. Will ASTRO feature a "masterclass" on leadership this year?
Radiation is particularly bad simply due to the era of current leadership. When this cohort entered residency training, there was a notable lull in applicant quality. At that time, Rad Onc was not held in high esteem, and medicine was happy to dump miscreants into the hospital basement. Thus, the extreme prevalence of Axis 2 disorders in more senior Radiation Oncologists. These are now our "leaders."
You mean like crying and screaming that the other team is spending too much, then immediately cutting tax...I mean revenue when its your turn, only to have them start spending with no abandon when its their turn again (cycle continues)? This is actually more of an economic than political metaphor. So few people actually understand macroeconomics that its incredibly easy to run your mouth and convince people believe anything despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.
The residency expansion was uniquely excessive . Furthermore, utilization was flat or decreasing and almost certainly grew less than other fields.
Yep. I don't buy the degenerate leaders of a certain generation narrative. That's extremely unlikely to be true.
I shoulda bought index funds.
A lot of hot-sht selective fields that are gold mines for hospitals and experienced actual patient growth like Uro, optho, ortho, plastics did not overexpand precisley because their leadership were not degenerate pos. Btw, the EIC of the red journal, Zeitman, often warned that radonc would crater and even compared it to the specialty treating syphilus before advent of antibiotics.
Radonc and EM expanded more than any other specialty since the turn of the century. EM because of greedy hospital and admins.
Good points.
IMRT explains most things
Remarkable how easy it was to markedly increase med student interest in an era where a newish intervention was being disseminated and was driving a marked increase in compensation.
Agree totally, it was an era where the field was making significant technical progress.
I saw his talk on this syphilis analogy also. He saw it coming.
Why? Buy now, pay later is more than a slogan. It’s a way of life.
Look at the leadership, some of them trained when rad onc was exactly as competitive as it is now. Things come full circle
discussed on sdn at the time. Steve Hahn and Wallner wrote editorial in red journal (referencing biblical Ruth?) that the field will need to evolve/ combine (maybe with interventional rads) to avoid extinction. Zeitman and Royce had multiple papers expressing concern.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
discussed on sdn at the time. Steve Hahn and Wallner wrote and editorial in red journal (referencing biblical Ruth?) that the field will need to evolve/ combine (maybe with interventional rads) to avoid extinction. Zeitman and Royce had multiple papers expressing concern about how the future.
Radiotherapy Utilization and Fractionation Patterns During the First Course of Cancer Treatment in the United States From 2004 to 2014 - PubMed
We found a steady decrease in the percent of patients receiving radiotherapy in their first course of treatment, and a global decline in the mean number of fractions delivered per patient receiving EBRT, compared with an increase in systemic therapy and stable surgery utilization. These results...
Ashton Kutcher seems to have pretty good business acumen. Probably would move us in the right direction. Definitely not worse.
Leadership is why I can't, in good conscience, recommend this field to anyone interested unless they love rad onc so much that they don't care where they end up working or how much they get paid in the end.
