Oh sorry guys. So i'm a 3rd year medical student, trying to decided what to pursue. I've already rotated on the aforementioned specialties and pretty much liked them all and can see myself doing any of them. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
You are welcome.
5-10 years is respectively a long period for health sector. Some treatments or techniques may be abandoned as some of them will resurge or invented by the time. Anyway the basic urology (which is unfortunately stood in the shadow of some technological advances in these days) will hold its place.
The main advantages of urology can be classified as:
-Wide patient and treatment spectrum. From neonatal period to elderly and male to female, we face with several different surgical and medical situations.
-Respectively better outcomes. It is sometimes boring to deal with complications such as incontinence or ED after RP but results of common operations like TUR-P/BT, VIU, Peyronie's surgery, inguinal surgery, microTESE is mostly good. Just placing a suprapupic catheter in patient with a glob vesicale is a wonderful intervention if you take a look from patients' side.
-Integration of technology. This part is not for me but most of our colleagues are very keen on adapting new technologies like lasers, robotics, flourescent imaging to practice.
-Office urology. A practice depends on management (mostly medical and some small interventions) of nocturnal enuresis, ED, BPH management, infertility etc would bring you a career with a low risk, low stress and intermediate income.
Some controversies are:
-Some contindicated views for PSA screening by public health authorities. Which can, arguably, lower PCa diagnosis. Anyway while you get on community based practice, you see that PCa is respectively low percentage of our case load (which is different for training hospitals).
-Growing appliance of radiotherapy and other interventions.
Some branch specific negative sides:
-You will see many men's bottom in a day. An average person see maybe one man bottom in his life, an urologist see hundreds
-You will see many penes in a day. Hundred to thousands
You will also "handle" that
For available positions and career choices:
-US docs would give a better idea about the future of branch. But I don't think that there will be a jobless urologist in the upcoming years. Compensation will be at least decent, I hope.
As a last idea if you want a surgical speciality with relatively less demanding lifestyle and a balanced field, urology is a good choice.