The whole rise and fall of specialities is real and happens all the time. Some of the reasons hashed out on here are because of the differences in the generation of students graduating medical school. If you guys read some of the busier sub forums (e.g., gas), you'll notice that lots of new grads are looking to get into jobs that offer most weekends and nights off whereas a lot of the current/older anesthesiologists left residency with a 'guns a blazing' attitude and were willing to put in way more than a typical 40 hr work week. There isn't anything wrong with either approach, but these changes in the pool of newly trained docs don't just start post-residency but also play a big role in determining what field these MS3/4s eventually decide to even pursue. 30 years ago, general surgery was a tougher match, and up until the last few years, as long as a US MD had a pulse and a willingness to work 80+ hours, with everything else being even slightly below average, they'd match nearly all the time.
Radiology went from being a field where the top students sought to match into to being an almost guaranteed match for most applicants of late. One of the doctors I know well explained how she and a few of her friends all graduated in the top 10% of her class--back when class rank was a big deal--and that the #1 student out of 200ish went into rads. More community programs have opened and the fear of over saturation have driven down competitiveness. People on SDN were shocked at the last charting outcomes, and just by glancing at the data superfluously, it showed that the pool of students that applied to Psych had a tougher time of matching than those applying to Rads. That would have been absurd to consider 15 years ago.
It's all to be taken with a grain of salt, but at the end of the day, just realize that the real-world isn't like med school. The sooner you get out of the med school bubble, you realize that no one really stops in the hallway of hospitals to get 5 minutes with any of the IR docs or Rad Oncs, albeit these fields are hyper-competitive. Any student should just do their best in class/boards/research/etc to have options at the end of the day. It's sad to think that some nsurg residents decide to leave the field during residency after working so hard to get in. I think I've read reports where attrition rates are in the 15-20% range and GS is also around there. Choosing a specialty is a huge decision and letting this idea of wanting to be perceived as 'elite' by peers isn't a good idea. By and large, competitiveness and its perception is prone to fluctuate, with surgical subspecialties usually being the toughest to match into along with derm. But, even this is a construct of supply vs demand. If there were only 200 spots to match into FM, the average board score would be 240+, just as is the case with derm, ENT, nsurg, and naturally, it's perceived appeal would go way up.
Find the field where you could see yourself working for the next 30 years. It's far more important to enjoy the work you do than to be caught up in some sort of rat race your whole life where you get off on the idea of being special for matching in whatever specialty was hot in the year 20xx.
