Which specialities were you on the fence about before chosing GSurg?

[techsurgeon]

So the title says it all. For those who finally decided to pursue a career in general surgery, which specialties or surgical subspecialties were you on the fence about while in medical school? And if you have time, it would be cool to hear why you eventually crossed the other specialties out.

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[SocialistMD]

So the title says it all. For those who finally decided to pursue a career in general surgery, which specialties or surgical subspecialties were you on the fence about while in medical school? And if you have time, it would be cool to hear why you eventually crossed the other specialties out.

Until the first year of med school, I thought I wanted to be a neurosurgeon. After doing clinical neuro trauma research, I realized the job satisfaction was not there. I then thought about urology, but after doing clinical rotations, I realized I enjoyed being be able to take care of the whole patient, not just a single organ system. I decided on GS and haven't looked back.

 

[notinkansas]

When I started medical school, I was pretty sure I wanted to do EM. Once I figured out that EM is mostly primary care, but for a population that won't take responsibility for folllow up, I eliminated that.

I wanted to look into anesthesia, but the way my medical school was structured we didn't have much time for electives. We were assigned random numbers in a lottery system and signed up for rotations based the numbers. So I never got a chance to investigate anesthesia. Nothing I could have done about it, but i regret that to this day.

I wound up matching in gen surg, but didn't finish. I'm still in limbo and will probably wind up in anesthesia. Many factors drove me out of surgery, one of which was laparoscopy, which I hate and never got very good at. Also rounding. I don't ever want to round again! A large part of me is fed up with medicine all together. If I could come up with a workable non clinical option, I'd take it.

 

[PennyLane153]

For as long as I could remember I wanted to go into Obstetrics. After several trauma and surgical rotations, I decided surgery was much more interesting, because you get to see a great variety of patients and the older surgical residents and attendings are more willing to teach students and allow to perform procedures. Unlike my obstetrics rotation, where I hardly got to do anything; which made me come to a conclusion, that most gynecolgists/obstetricians are insecure about their own performance, hence they are very insecure when It comes to teaching students or interns. Plus they sometimes forget basic anatomy such as confusing a ureter or the sigmoid colon or any surrounding structures when they operate, LOL. J/K

 

[ESU_MD]

My 2nd choice to surgery was family medicine.

Much better than standard IM since I felt you had to more well rounded.
I'd much rather do office visits than hospital rounds- esp if the office staff was cool.

You tend to really make a difference in peoples life since you tend to them for all the nuts and bolts.

If you think about it- its pretty tough to manage a pt with 20 complaints and problems in a 10min visit- esp without generating 20 consults to specialists or ordering a million useless tests. I always tell the juniors that the ICU patients are the EASIEST to take care of since you have all the monitoring devices, labs, resources etc..

The other thing I liked was that most of these FM guys were genuine and actually TRIED to do the right thing within their limited training. it is a crime they make such little money, compared to certain other specialties who just dump off their work...