plastic surgery

[xylemera]

How competitive are plastic surgery residencies? Anyone out there know the details about it? Can you decide whether you just want to go into cosmetics or reconstructive, or do you have to do both? How is the lifestyle for a private practice plastic surgeon? Academic? Lastly, and just for completeness sake, what are the best plastic surgery residency programs out there...

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[doepug]

Plastic surgery is extraordinarily competitive. Often, people who don't make the cut out of medical school complete part (or all) of a general surgery residency before pursuing a plastics fellowship. Training programs will expose you to both reconstructive and cosmetic procedures. As a resident, you won't have much liberty to pick and choose cases. Private practice depends on your focus. If you're a cosmetic surgeon, then you're in business for yourself and work as much or as little as you want. If you do reconstruction (far more interesting), you'll obviously have to take trauma call, which has a less predictable schedule. In my admittedly biased opinion, the best program is Hopkins. The dept chair (Dr Manson) was the main force behind legitimizing plastics as an academic discipline; he and the other faculty continue to be leaders in the field.

Good luck,
doepug

 

[ckent]

Is the Hopkins plastics program combined with the Maryland program? I had heard that because there were not enough plastics cases to go around, the plastics fellows rotated through both hospitals.

 

[Winged Scapula]

Moving to the Plastic Surgery forum...

 

[droliver]

Originally posted by doepug
The dept chair (Dr Manson) was the main force behind legitimizing plastics as an academic discipline; he and the other faculty continue to be leaders in the field.

While Dr. Manson (and Dr. Vander-Kolk) is certainly respected, Plastic Surgery was "legitimized" several generations before him (he only finished in 1978) by figures like Converse (NYU), Dingman (Michigan), Ralph Millard (Miami), Mustarde, Tom Rees (NYU), Josh Jurkiewicz (Emory), Pitanguy, etc...

 

[maxheadroom]

Manson is a strong chair, but JHU is not one of the top programs. The Hopkins name helps it, but in my opinion as a PGY-1 PRS resident who interviewed pretty widely, Hopkins wasn't all that hot. Lots of people on the trail last year agreed. It's no NYU, UCLA, UTSW, Baylor, or UCSF. Those are the current powerhouses. Hopkins is good, but the PRS applicants will see that it's far from the best.