Should I drop podiatry for DO in my 3rd year.

[Jaydog2424]

I’m having a bad case of grass is greener syndrome.
Just to give some perspective, Podiatry, unlike many other medical specialties, has no real average salary. So you don’t know if you’ll be making 80K or 1M a year. It’s up to luck in many ways? Anyway I’m in 24 YO and in my 3rd year. Already passed boards that only had a 76% pass rate this year, got through all the tough classes ( which BTW were 90% the same classes with the same professors as our MD school) so they drove me into insanity, but I passed them all. I chose podiatry because I was scared of the potential to not match into orthopedics after 4 grueling years of med school. So I went the safe route of guaranteeing myself surgery and will be doing many of the same things an FA- orthopedist would do. Everyone assumes I couldn’t get into med school. But I actually graduated with a 3.85 GPA and about 50th percentile MCAT, good enough for many DO schools. I’m about to start a 3 year residency next year and am having some second thoughts when I hear about some people in the field making under 200K for the rest of their life. This seems so low given the work put in. I’m up at night every night til 4 am wondering if I should just apply to DO schools and switch after graduating podiatry in a year so I don’t lose my progress. This way I’ll have infinite possibilites. I like the field honestly but get scared of being “ locked in “ What do you guys think?

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[Dr Meow]

My take:
You're probably not going to match ortho as DO. Especially now that USMLE/COMLEX is pass/fail. Stay in podiatry if that's your goal.
And you're almost done anyways and what, podiatry is 2 years residency? For that'll take you 3 years to be totally done.
You'll be 27 by then and you'll be a set doctor.

If you want to go back to med school, you can do it then. I'm starting med school at 28. You'll be my age if you decide to go back and reapply. And I don't feel super old.

 

[Ho0v-man]

You’re 4 years out from doing a job you like with a good lifestyle and good pay. Sounds like this is just an ego thing.

If you’re not at least comfortable with being a PCP, you should not attend medical school. That goes double for osteopathic schools.

To put it in perspective: you’re giving up doing something you admit to liking in your first post in 4 years for the chance that you might be able to do something else that you might like more in 9-10 years. That’s honestly kinda dumb.

 

[PTPuser]

I'm a pod also. You're doing it wrong if you're taking on those 80K positions. It's legit scam. If you decide to continue on and finish pod school, residency and you can't find anything worth your skills, put your adult pants on and open shop. Yeah you gotta hustle but lets be honest, who in medicine that's making a "killing" aren't hustling?

Rarely I have I ever met an MD DO DPM DDS DMD etc that aren't hustling. My PCP is making 400K but that's because he's doing almost 1000 RVUs per month. Same with other pods on this site and if you're talking to a solid, well oiled shop that some of the pods in the regular everyday community are running, those numbers aren't unheard of.

You're at an awesome time right now where you're about to go out for externships / SubIs so you can rock it and see a different world than the crap they feed us at school.

 

[gyngyn]

This thread can be followed here: Leaving podiatry for MD/DO