This is pretty interesting I think...Totally shooting from the hip and going on instinct, but it does seem to be there's a good chance this is most common in some surgical subspecialties --- ophtho, maybe urology, that kind of thing...They're both kind of niche specialties, and although I don't know how it was back in the day, now it's hard to get into these unless you're interested fairly early on...They're both fairly competitive, and on top of that, they're not really heavily exposed to most med students, except those with an early interest -- people don't do rotations in these kinds of things until 4th year...to get any earlier exposure (which is pretty necessary to actually get into their fields), you really have to seek it out, and having a urologist in the family is probably one of the factors more likely to influence a young med student to go seek out urology opportunities.
Despite being specialized, these kinds of things have been around long enough to show generational effects...There have long been ophthalmologists -- it's totally possible to have a 3 generation string of them, and much less likely to have 3 generations of, I dunno, interventional radiologists, radiation oncologists, full EM physicians (meaning fully EM residency trained, which is pretty new), or really even most medical subspecialties, which were much less common a few generations ago (there weren't nearly as many cardiologists 2 generations ago, when there was much less cardiologists could actually do).
I'm sure there are lots of families where the recurring specialty would be internal medicine...but I dunno, there are also more IM docs than anything else...So I don't like the idea that's the most common or most likely or whatever, even if thats what the numbers actually show...If an internists child goes into internal medicine, is it because of the early family influence, or just because it was most likely anyway?
Psych seems like something else that would be passed down well through generations -- if only because it's its own kind of niche specialty...the interests and personalities than are likely to be drawn to and succeed in psych at least on some level run in families, and once in medicine, psych seems like it has its own world more than some other specialties...
The cynic in me can't help but think about money, which'd point back toward the surgical subspecialties...Kids who grow up in families with highly paid surgical specialists might be a little more drawn to them, because this is the payment and lifestyle they've come to expect of medicine as a whole, and once they get to the point its time to narrow down and decide on specialties, they realize that even within medicine, the only way to actually get that payment and lifestyle is to gravitate towards the same high-paying group of specialties...This, I suppose, is my own personal bias and may be likely to get me flamed...😳 🙁 🙂 😎
For what it's worth, my grandfather was a pediatrician, and this is what I plan on doing as well...no other docs in the family.
