Recent Pain Fellowship Match...Implications for Pain?
Started by drusso
Get help with your application
Use all the free resources available to you from SDN: articles, guides, expert advising, forums discussions, and school research.
Got any text to post alongside those images? Were these schools picked specifically? Do you have issues with certain fellows pictured here? Are these merely examples of pain programs and the fact that they filled and you want people to talk about that?
Literally no idea what sort of discussion you're trying to start here.
Literally no idea what sort of discussion you're trying to start here.
Advertisement - Members don't see this ad
We've got to take Claude away from program coordinators.
I don’t think our future colleagues would appreciate their pictures being posted on the forum in this manner. If you want to talk about trends in admissions changing that’s one thing, but plastering their faces into the discussion is another. They are still trainees.
They were already posted elsewhere. You're right, though; they should make sure they consented to their programs posting them.
The context in which their programs posted their matches is completely different than you trying to stir things up. They are trainees. This is poor taste even for you.
I think that is what he's getting at
I think you're overreading it.
Agree with your second sentence not the first. Programs never give up funded spots.
I was looking around last month and I see more pain jobs advertised than I ever remember seeing before. The strong anesthesia market has pulled a lot of double boarded gas/Pain docs back to anesthesia.
That said, if anesthesia cools off and a significant percentage of those docs want back into Pain, at that point yes we may have too many pain trained docs for the current market.
I doubt anesthesia will cool enough to force people back into pain. Pain is the dream of the 90s.
Agreed
I also remember the "stigma" of being a PM&R applying to pain fellowships 20 years ago. One fellowship director told me he would never take more than 1 PM&R fellow every other year because he didn't want his program to get a reputation for being PM&R-friendly. Kiss of death.
Advertisement - Members don't see this ad
I don't see it that way. My thought is they look like fine candidates. The implication I saw was that general anesthesia is hot right now, if this sampling is any indication. It's hard to tell from this small sample size.
We don't have the ERAS data yet, but if last year is any indication, anesthesia continues to be very hot and is pulling applicants strongly away from pain.
Last year's ERAS applicants (applicants, not who matched) were:
38.5% PMR
24% Anesthesia
13.8% EM
23.8% everything else (Neuro/psych/FM etc)
PMR took the lead from anesthesia in 2024 and hasn't looked back.
basing the claim of "hasnt looked back" on one year of data is specious. additionally, basing it on who applied rather than who was accepted is another tenuous layer.
seemingly more apropros than PMR "took the lead" is the statement that anesthesia "gave up the lead to focus on core anesthesia practice".
There seem to be a lot more applicants from EM. I also noticed that in the photos above. Makes sense because EM now has a pathway to be ACGME board certified and also because after a couple years of EM training, that residents might think maybe this really isn't the lifestyle they want to have for the next 30 years.
We've been watching the The Pitt on HBO. It definitely presents a more realistic portrayal of EM than the TV show ER did back in the 90s. I'm sure part of this is me being older and more burnt out, but when I watch the Pitt, I think "this is interesting....but thank god I don't have to do it", while when I watched ER as a premed and early med student, I mostly thought "this is so cool, I would like to do that"....
Last edited:
the portrayal of EM on ER became less realistic as the seasons rolled on.
the first 2 seasons werent bad.
it happened to ER, Grey's Anatomy, St. Elsewhere, and apparently even the earliest seasons of MASH (no, i was too young to watch)
that will probably happen to the Pitt.
the first 2 seasons werent bad.
it happened to ER, Grey's Anatomy, St. Elsewhere, and apparently even the earliest seasons of MASH (no, i was too young to watch)
that will probably happen to the Pitt.
I haven't finished season 2 of the Pitt yet, but it is easily the most accurate portrayal of the ER I've ever seen.
I get very brief twinges of nostalgia and wistfulness for life as an ER doc, followed by the near immediate pleasant exhale associated with the realization that I never have to do it again.
Do I regret my time in the department? No. Do I want to work there again? Also no. Pain is less than half as hard and twice as pleasant.
