Ortho and ICU fellowship?

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anony mouse

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Hi all, in my fourth year of medical school, just finished up a critical care rotation and really enjoyed it. I worked with a few general surgeons who also acted as ICU attendings, but also a neurosurgeon who was boarded in critical care. I am going into ortho and was wondering if it would be possible to some day do a critical care fellowship and have a "combined" practice, similar to the neurosurgeon I worked with. Clearly neurosurg is a more logical connection to ICU (and ortho surgeons aren't exactly known for their medicine skills), but I was intrigued by this possibility and was wondering if anyone had heard of it being done. Thanks for the thoughts!

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Hi all, in my fourth year of medical school, just finished up a critical care rotation and really enjoyed it. I worked with a few general surgeons who also acted as ICU attendings, but also a neurosurgeon who was boarded in critical care. I am going into ortho and was wondering if it would be possible to some day do a critical care fellowship and have a "combined" practice, similar to the neurosurgeon I worked with. Clearly neurosurg is a more logical connection to ICU (and ortho surgeons aren't exactly known for their medicine skills), but I was intrigued by this possibility and was wondering if anyone had heard of it being done. Thanks for the thoughts!

Have NOT heard of that being done. One of the draws of ortho always seemed to be getting other people to take care of your patients for you. The ABS seems to indicate anyone from one of the surgical backgrounds, provided it's an ABMS specialty of which ortho obviously is one, and you've finished either a surgical or anesthesia fellowship in critical care.

So, sounds possible, but I'd bet dollars to donuts you'll be ready to go make that 400-500k a year after you've finished 5 years of ortho, rather than slum it for a year or two in shock/trauma surgery.
 
Now that I'm done laughing. Never seen it done. I don't even know many ortho docs that even attempt to handle basic medical issues on their pts. I've heard more ortho docs refer to medical peeps as fleas than any other surgical specialty.
 
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As an ortho resident, I saw the title of this thread and just had to comment.

There is no way to do a critical care fellowship through ortho, meaning the AAOS does not have any critical care fellowship. You MAY MAY be able to do a critical care fellowship through some surgery program.

However, you're going to do four plus years and never do any critical care. It's just not something we do, and something the large majority of us don't want to do. Your attendings aren't there to supervise you trying to manage patients in the unit, and they aren't credentialed to do so. Hell, we aren't even credentialed to put in central lines.

I would like to think you're an idealistic med student. Once you're in the trenches you will see that A) critical care sucks and B) it takes away time from fixing bones and C) fixing bones pays more than taking care of rocks in the unit.

Give it a few years, most likely you will lose your zeal for critical care.
 
Critical care doesn't suck! It's awesome


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