Medical school has taught me the importance of lifestyle. I realized that I no longer have the interest to work too hard. So I'm soul searching.
I'm thinking FM because of the flexibility and the sheer volume of job offers in primary care (3-4 day work weeks, no call, no inpatient, no OB, no nights, no weekends) in desirable locations. There is no shortage of primary care jobs. All for the same pay as a hospitalist. Is primary care easier than hospitalist?
I keep hearing medicine is "not chill". Is this true? Is being a hospitalist stressful, very work intensive and you burn out more easily? Is the job heavily intellectually demanding (I do like repetitiveness and being on autopilot) or do you get the hang of things and just automatically work?
Also:
Who is better at inpatient: IM or FM?
Who is better at outpatient: IM or FM?
Why would someone choose IM over FM if they want to be a hospitalist? They both can do it. Doesn't FM give you more flexibility?
Hospitalist for 10 years here. Is hospitalist work "chill?" Depends entirely on where you work. My first job out of residency was brutal in a lot of ways. Way harder than residency. Very busy practice, very busy call days, got burnt out fairly quickly and left. I now work in a semi-rural location. Job is mostly very chill. Today I have only 11 patients on my census and my NP is seeing 3 of them. 2 of them are in the ICU and the Intensivitist does all of the work and fields all the phone calls for them. I'm on call either 7-1 or 1-7 every day. We usually only admit 3-5 in the afternoons and 1-2 in the mornings. And I'm currently being paid a very good rate for the area because they were desperate for physicians and I negotiated it. I've consistently made over 300k the last several years here. So yeah, my job is CHILL. It's not very hard for me to see patients after 10 years of experience and our patients are relatively low acuity so rounding is very fast. I'm usually quite bored at work though and can't wait to get out of here each day. Fortunately we're able to leave when we're not on call. It would be torture to sit here all day when not on call.
HOWEVER...the job is unstable. The hospital is a money losing entity and has been bought up by a bigger health care system in the region, in part because of the whole pandemic. They take over soon and will probably bring a lot more business here. There's a good chance this place will no longer be chill for much longer, which is the general trend in hospital medicine...big corporate money comes in and starts squeezing docs hard. Add to this the fact that I'm not board certified and I'm no longer board eligible (as of this year) so my job outlooks are not great. I probably won't be offered a job with the new hospital system once they are fully up and running (which could be a few years down the road). Fortunately for me, I didn't want to continue this career for much longer anyway. So, I'm planning on looking for a new, non-medical career once this job dries up. In the mean time, I'm saving pretty aggressively and have enough cash on hand to pay the bills for quite some time while searching for a new career.
If you're a med student and already saying you don't want to work too hard, my advice to you is this: Save nearly every dime you make immediately. Pay off your student loans immediately. Do NOT increase your lifestyle at all. Do NOT buy a house. Do NOT buy a new car. Do NOT spend anything more than you spend now as a student. You will burn out very quickly and be unable to work for very long in today's medical system. Start thinking of new career opportunities for yourself now, because likely you'll be searching for a new career within about 5 years of practice (you may not even survive residency to be honest). Also, the only thing that matters these days in medicine is "board certification" If you can't pass IM or FM boards, you will be nearly unemployable as a physician. This will be even more true by time you finish residency. So, don't waste any time trying to be academic or even bother being a good person. Employers won't even consider you or look at your application unless you have passed one of those pointless multiple choice memory games. Spend all your time starting now memorizing board review questions and figure out how to pass. I can't tell you how many TERRIBLE physicians I know and have worked with who are "board certified" Nothing else matters. Seriously.
Being a student is fun and easy. Working in the real world is usually neither of these things.