any specialty you work in will have it's share of fatties, or non-compliant patients, or general idiots. that is the way it is. think of the homeless guy with maggots in his leg ulcers. or the 500lb medical patient with too many problems to list.
basically, at least in my experience, you will find the specialty that you enjoy during rotations, when you are immersed in them. there are many factors, including the quality of teaching on the rotation, whether you are a thinker or a doer, whether you like taking care of really sick patients or generally heathy patents, if you like kids, men, women, etc....what you think you will like about a specialty will very likely change when you actually experience it. you may change altogether, or enjoy it for a new reason...
i can tell you that ob/gyn was on the bottom of my list when i started med school. (well, right after psych, which stayed on the bottom!). mainly, i couldn't see what would be so appealing about working with only women, and on problems with the reproductive system. however, after exposure to the other specialties, i found that ob/gyn had a patient population that i liked (generally healthy, lots of preventive and primary care, but still a few sickies thrown in to keep it interesting), had a great mix of office and OR (i love the OR, but do also enjoy the long-term patient care of ob/gyn), had an interesting range of sub-specialty options (urogyn, gyn onc, REI, MFM), and there is also lots of opportunity to do some international health care in undevelopend countries.
internal med and surg (and all of the sub-specialties) have plenty going for them as well, and you need to find your fit. but, you could also just look at the gross or boring aspects of care, and focus on the negative, as it seems your colleagues are doing with ob/gyn. who wants to treat 40 non-compliant diabetic/htn/copd patients in a day? do you really want to be snaking a roto-rooter tube up some guys butt all day long? or how about the FP or psych that gets to see infinite depressed folks, all day long? and, lets not forget that ALL specialties (well, maybe not all, but most) get the joy of rectal exams! so, with all that in mind, is ob/gyn really that different, in terms of patients? no,not really. there are good and bad. there are procedures that are less fun than others. you have to see sexual organs in various states of disrepair. but, there are a lot of great and exciting things about the specialty, and if these things you need from a carreer, you will be very happy in ob/gyn.
happiness in medicine is where you find it AND where you make it. no specialty is perfect for everyone. but, no specialty is terrible as well. people that talk poorly about other specialties usually either had a single bad experience and use that to try to tarnish the field, they don't know what they are talking about, or they are the type of person that thinks that the only good thing on earth is what they themselves are doing. none of these people ever seem to offer good advice...so, be careful what you listen to and avoid taking to heart others judgements of a field. make your own decisions and allow others to do the same.
