Saying, verbatim, Hi, I am a nurse Nurse Anesthetist and I do the same thing as a doctor but they get paid a little more money than me. As well, he stated making 175K. Then he went into the degree he had and all it was is a BA in nursing and a master's degree in anesthesiology.
What seems crazy about the whole thing is that it is true. I actually really feel bad for doctors on this one. What in the world is a person who has about 10 years less training and experience doing with a salary that is basically equivilant to a doctors. 1000'sK less debt and more time actually in the field doing the job.
Seems totally outta wack. What do you all think? oh, P.S. this was an e-mail sent to a girlfriend of mine that was on Match.com
I've done a year of hospital-based surgery training after dental school (which included performing procedures in the OR), so I have some experience with anesthesiologists and CRNAs.
Yes, there have been many situations where I've performed a procedure in the OR and saw the anesthesiologist literally for two minutes at the beginning and end of the case while the CRNA remained in the room throughout, administered the drugs, intubated, and extubated. Make no mistake about it, however, they do not have the same role and they are not interchangeable entities. CRNAs are very well trained to do what they do, and that is deliver anesthesia care. Notice the use of the word "deliver" in the sentence. Anesthesiologists, by contrast, are not only well trained to deliver anesthesia, but to plan it. Yes indeed, there is such a thing as an anesthesia "plan", just like there is such a thing as a surgical plan.
Anesthesia is a lot more than administering drugs until the patient no longer responds to a 1cm incision. Having had some experience in anesthesia myself (i.e. performing intravenous sedations), I can tell you that 1. you need to have an intimate knowledge of the medical aspects of anesthesia and pharmacology (especially the pharmacology of the drugs you plan to use) as well as an intimate knowledge of your patient's health history, and 2. delivering anesthesia is rarely a cookie-cutter task; patients respond to anesthesia very differently. Where one patient may not respond at all to 100mcg of Fentanyl, another may go apneic. It's often hard to predict, especially when your training is less.
An anesthesiologist, as you know, has been through four years of medical school as well as a year of medicine residency prior to beginning his/her training in anesthesiology. Hence, an anesthesiologist is a physician--a physician whose medical specialty is the science and practice of anesthesia. That fact carries with it some very important implications. The anesthesiologist, unlike a CRNA, is not only (better) trained to deliver anesthesia care and handle complications, but is also a diagnostician, which makes him/her better at assessing a patient for anesthesia and thus, as I mentioned above, forming an anesthesia "plan".
Don't get me wrong, here--CRNAs serve a very important role and as a doctor (and perhaps a patient at some point in my life) I'm more than comfortable working with a CRNA--provided there's an anesthesiologist somewhere in the picture who knows what's going on.
Finally, as far as money goes: I don't know what CRNAs make (although I have my doubts about that $175k figure). But from what I've heard, anesthesiologists make a ton of it.
