Medical Microbiology vs Infectious Disease and job market for both

[VoiceofReason]

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Hi folks, I think I understand the major differences between these two careers but I was hoping someone with more experience would like to comment on the major differences between the jobs at the end of these two fellowships.

also im curious about the job market for them seeing as one is a subspecialty of path. thanks

 

[yaah]

Are you talking about

1) Infectious disease as a fellowship after completing an IM residency, and
2) Medical microbiology fellowship (after path or whatever) where you learn how to run a lab, do research, etc?

Because there is really no contest there. Infectious disease trained people are fellowship trained internists who treat patients. These physicians are in fairly high demand but are not highly compensated compared to other IM specialties (like GI or cardiology). A lot of their job these days is spent dealing with long term antibiotic management or management of immunosuppressed patients. Lots of people find this very boring. Medical microbiology trains you to run a micro lab, but you do not need such a fellowship to run smaller (community hospital) micro labs. People who run large academic or reference lab micro labs are often PhDs or MDs who do research + assume the lab responsibilties.

 

[KCShaw]

Ditto yaah.

Might want to ask in one of the other forums for more detailed information about the life of an infectious diseases physician. As for medical microbiology (using yaah's basic description of primarily a laboratory specialist), it's a relatively small niche. The MD's coming at it from the pathology route (rather than a non-MD PhD-only, who I get the impression are competing well for those jobs) are fairly few and far between; in 2009 11 people took the subspecialty exam and 9 passed, and it's only offered every 2 years. Maybe one of them is lurking around and can comment.

My impression, though, is that unless you're a gun &/or willing to find a large &/or academic lab, it's not easy to find a job doing nothing but medical micro while getting paid reasonably and actually maximizing the use of fellowship training. Mix it with other things, however, and that changes (also cover clinical chemistry, the rest of the lab, or some AP, as examples). Kinda the classic issue of whether to pay a PhD less to do one job, vs an MD more to hopefully do more than one job.