Interesting perspective of the original poster and the comments. On an overall general bird's eye in any hospital/clinic there are more adult patients with complex medical problems i.e. alot of my inpatient medicine patients had consults to each department in the hospital, and it seemed that everyone of them got an automatic consult to ID. In general pediatrics there is alot of well-child visits and easily diagnoses self-limited conditions e.g. scarlet fever.
But don't be mislead thinking that pediatrics is somehow less complex or satisfying than adult medicine, here are a couple of positives of Pediatrics :
1. Development Matters. In Pediatrics there is a big difference between fever in a 15 day old newborn versus a fourth month old versus a teenager, in reality we are taught to deal with several distinct developmental/age groups, and to learn most common diseases/organisms etc for each age group. There are some differences in geriatrics patients to know about, but usually these are not as prominent and do not seem to affect care as much as in pedi patients.
2. Complex social issues. Pediatricians deal with children who are developing in a complex social milieu and we must take into account the social aspects of their illness, how it impacts school work, and their emotional development.
3. There are many intellectually stimulating subspecialties of pediatrics, such as hematology. Now, say if I wanted to specialize in pediatric hematology, I could a large number of Sickle Cell pediatric patients that have only that problem, and no or few other medical problems and focus on treating this aspect of their illness.
4. New scientific developments, i.e. stem cell therapy/gene therapy, when these are perfected they will be optimally used in childhood when the target genetic disease is identified.
5. Sick kids often get better! Children, fortunately, have a great capacity to recover from many grave illnesses, and there are better treatments being developed all the time, which gives you a sense of having conquered a disease, when actually it is the kids physiology doing the trick.
6. Surgeons are mastefully technicians, but you have to make the diagnosis in the first place, and then consult surgery for suspected appendicitis, so it is a team effort, pediatric surgeons can exist with pediatricians.
7. There is always a large amount of research going on into Pediatric diseases, it is just that adults have a wider age span i.e. 18 to 65+, and make up majority of inpatient population when they get older that is seems that they get alot of the attention. Furthermore, if you want to do research there is always a need for pediatrician physician scientists and I believe a lack of them, and there is a special program through the NIH.
8. Because we deal with young children, and the results of improprerly caring for diseases early in their life could lead to even more devastating morbidity and mortality, given the greater number of years they have to live, our care of children is one of the most critical in the hospital and should have the best and brightest medical students in pediatrics, period.
If you want something Pedi, something procedure and technologically intense then go for Neonatology, always alot of amazing new stuff going on, remember the one room in the hospital that surgeons are afraid of is the Neonatology Unit, where medications are measured in the smallest amounts, with critically smalls margins for error, and some of the procedures they perform would make a general surgeon pass out!
