Not based on easier to complete or hours of residency but on Roughly how high on top of your class do you have to be to match into orthopedic surgery, neuro, cardio... or OMFS orthodontics.
Is md surgery matching> or< dental speciality in terms of ease of matching. Sorry for double post.
I think the problem with this question is that it doesn't contemplate how people make decisions, at least in medicine. You are going to do this career for the next 40 years, so you pick what you like, not the most competitive thing you can get. Meaning the first decision along the medical school path is to decide whether you want medicine or surgery, and once you pick that direction, you pick which subspecialty makes you happiest. It's really not very uncommon for the top students to pick paths that others would deem noncompetitive simply because it's what they enjoy. I've known top students who chose IM, peds, neurology, EM for a variety of reasons. I've also known many top students who went into general surgery, choosing it over things like ortho or plastics, because they had surgical subspecialties in mind.
I think you need to realize your question is unanswerable both because the premise is faulty, as described above, and because you are comparing apples and oranges and the statistical answer and the real answer are probably not as helpful as you might think. Neurosurgery is probably the most competitive by statistics, because there are so few slots, but it is misleading because the number of applicants tends not to be particularly huge because the subject matter is so finite and because the years of training are so long. It is pretty common for the top surgery bound students in any class to have no interest in neurosurgery and the folks who go this route often aren't any more competitive than the ortho/plastics or ROAD crowd. I would say that honestly the most competitive surgical fields by stats tend to be plastics, optho and ortho, in that order, although neurosurg will beat them if you look purely at statistics, based on number of applicants per slot.
Not sure what you meant by "cardio". Cardiothoracic surgery is most often not matched into, it is a fellowship after general surgery. However it is often said to be a dying field (average age of cardiothoracic surgeons is late sixties) and not at all competitive once you are already in gen surg. If by cardio you meant cardiology, this is not a matchable specialty -- you go into this after doing an IM residency, meaning you go through a not particularly competitive field to get there. Basically neither IM nor general surgery is particularly competitive, but some of the subspecialties thereafter are quite competitive.
I have very limited knowledge of the dental path, drawn primarily from family members and grad school roommates who went that route. However from what I've observed, what is involved to get into, get through, be toward the top of your med school class and matching into a competitive field such as, say, ortho or neurosurg is going to be as hard, if not harder, than anything on the dental path.
