Psychiatry? or Radiology?

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pokebab

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I'm going through my internship in one of the Europian country and having a hard time choosing what line of career I'll go after internship.

I have narrowed down my options to two : Psychiatry or Radiology.

Many would think that these are two very different fields of medicine(Psychiatry has a lot of doctor-patient interactions while Radiology not..etc etc) but I have my little reasons for contemplating over these two :

Somtimes in the future, I want to do research about the brain.

I was very deeply inspired by Eric Kandel, who is a psychiatrist and a Nobel laureate who discovered the basic mechanisms of memory storage. I'm wishing to do my own line of research someday considering the mechanisms of human brain, and I'm wondering which path would be better for me : Psychiatry? or Radiology?

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Actually not an uncommon dilemma.

Do you want take care of patients and be your patient's doctor? Psychiatry is a no brainer (pun intended). Look at it this way - if you want to study the organic brain, radiology will not be very satisfying because in large part we image structural abnormalities. You will also have a long time to go before you do anything significant with regard to functional brain imaging if you go the radiology route, and you'll probably need to be a neurorad in an academic setting to even dabble in the field. Psychiatry and neurology do much more with functional imaging than we do.

Go the psychiatry route - you will be a doctor with all the flexibility that entails, and you can dabble in imaging as much as you like. There will be plenty of opportunities to get involved with functional imaging research from the psychiatry side of things if you are so inclined.

You may consider neurology also, of course. Honestly, there is no need to go into radiology if you are just interested in incorporating imaging into your clinical practice. No respecting neurologist or neurosurgeon relies on our reports - for the most part they look at the images themselves and make up their own minds. If you like the organic brain want to do brain imaging, sitting through years of radiology residency learning about unrelated areas of imaging such as breast imaging will be very painful.
 
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Actually not an uncommon dilemma.

Do you want take care of patients and be your patient's doctor? Psychiatry is a no brainer (pun intended). Look at it this way - if you want to study the organic brain, radiology will not be very satisfying because in large part we image structural abnormalities. You will also have a long time to go before you do anything significant with regard to functional brain imaging if you go the radiology route, and you'll probably need to be a neurorad in an academic setting to even dabble in the field. Psychiatry and neurology do much more with functional imaging than we do.

Go the psychiatry route - you will be a doctor with all the flexibility that entails, and you can dabble in imaging as much as you like. There will be plenty of opportunities to get involved with functional imaging research from the psychiatry side of things if you are so inclined.

You may consider neurology also, of course. Honestly, there is no need to go into radiology if you are just interested in incorporating imaging into your clinical practice. No respecting neurologist or neurosurgeon relies on our reports - for the most part they look at the images themselves and make up their own minds. If you like the organic brain want to do brain imaging, sitting through years of radiology residency learning about unrelated areas of imaging such as breast imaging will be very painful.

Well said.

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OP - Shadow/spend some time in the the two fields, that'll answer your question very quickly.

Psych is a great lifestyle field but its scope just wasn't for me.

Experience is the only way to satisfy your question. If not, you may forever have 'what if' question of - what would life be like if I went into psych/rads.
 
Radiology, radiology, and radiology.
 
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