What is the most "hands-on" specialty?

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mac_kin

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if you are considering sports medicine, you may want to look into the osteopathic route. you get a lot of extra training in manipulation medicine and there are even NMM fellowships.

as far as non-surgical "hands on" specialties that are related to PT, this is about as close as you'll get.
 
massage therapy😀

ortho seems pretty "hands on". they use drills and saws.
 
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Aside from surgery; what is the most "hands-on" specialty?

I am coming from an athletic and physical therapy background. Writing MCAT this spring/summer and hopefully entering med school in a year.

I would like to know, what is the most similar specialty to my background as AT/PT, in terms of working with my hands and helping people to rehab? Do sport medicine doctors actually get to do a lot of "hands-on" stuff?

Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation....PM&R
 
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I don't know anything about PM&R, but I have spent a little time shadowing a family practice sports medicine physician. Not sure if this is usual, but she saw about 20 patients a day. She saw a good mix of things--sports injuries on athletes and bodybuilders, but also teens with unexplained back pain, older adults with knee problems, etc. She gave a lot of referrals to surgeons, duh, and a lot of prescriptions for physical therapy. I'm not sure how "hands on" you'd call it... she didn't do many procedures other than injections (but man did she give a LOT of injections). It was interesting, though, and I got the sense that she enjoyed working with mainly healthy people in all different age groups.
 
Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation....PM&R


So I'm looking the bios of some random faculty in PM&R in different schools and I see that they work in neuromuscular disease, amputation, SCI.

So is it safe to say that PM&R docs work with physical disease while Sport Med docs work with athletes? So as a sport med doc I would be treating/training sports injuries only and sending a patient with muscular dystrophy to the PM&R doc?



What I would really appreciate is if someone could maybe just take me through the "typical day" in the life of a PM&R vs Sport Med doc.

I have contacted a few in my area and hope that someone will be willing to let me shadow or ask questions etc.

Thanks!

Can someone explain the difference between PM&R and sport medicine?

In terms of training, I hear that for sports med, you go into family residency then do a specialization in PM&R. For PM&R do you go into PM&R residency?

http://ortho.stanford.edu/education/pmr-sports-medicine.html


Sports med is not a residency its a fellowship. There is no PM&R fellowship its a residency.

No its not safe to come the the conclusion you came to because there are many PM&R fellowships and you were mainly looking at the wrong specialization. Yes the PM&R mainly works in neurological issues because the that is the main focus of residency. I have linked the Standford sports med page becuase you can see what is all involved in the sports medicine portion of pm&r. It is more athletes and more towards the PT style of patient interaction that you mentioned earlier.
 
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Aside from surgery; what is the most "hands-on" specialty?

I am coming from an athletic and physical therapy background. Writing MCAT this spring/summer and hopefully entering med school in a year.

I would like to know, what is the most similar specialty to my background as AT/PT, in terms of working with my hands and helping people to rehab? Do sport medicine doctors actually get to do a lot of "hands-on" stuff?

I think what you're asking is referred to as the procedural specialties. Anything surgical, of course, fits...general surgery, trauma, ortho, transplant, vascular, etc. Urology and ophthomology are also surgical specialties. Anesthesia (the para-surgical specialty?) is hands on in terms of intubation and pushing meds.

Of the non-surgical fields, some of the more procedural subspecialties include interventional radiology, interventional cardiology (i.e. caths and stents), GI (EGDs and colonoscopies), and critical care. Most of the other specialties have a procedure or two (e.g. heme/onc and bone marrow biopsies), but are more "thinking" specialties. These are all fellowships, and will require completion of a residency first (for those I've listed: radiology for IR, internal medicine for the rest).

I'll leave the physiatry discussion to those above who are more knowledgeable (it's not a specialty most of us run into in med school), but it's worth considering with your background.
 
Sorry. My comments related to surgery. So I am deleting my comments. I am going into surgery.
 
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