while i'm waiting...
while i'm waiting for the lecture videos to completely download, i figured i might as well write in this thing. i guess you can say that i'm giving into peer pressure considering out of the 2 or 3 that regularly read this journal, one of you spoke up ( Read more... )
I was lucky enough to spend a month on Peds Radiology on my M4 year; and my brother is a radiology R3 at Northwestern. The thing about Radiology is that you are under such massive time pressure (with literally hundreds of radiology studies to read every twelve hour period) and under such massive performance pressure (every read has got to be perfect, every time, at a glance) that unless you are very careful in your choice of Radiology sub-specialty you really won't *get* much patient exposure. You're going to spend your life -- almost your whole life -- in front of a PACS station and your dictation terminal. Just by the nature of the beast, you're going to have extremely minimal patient contact; many times, the study will have been done hours before, or at a completely different site. You almost have to *want* to go into a branch of medicine where you'll almost never actually see a patient.
There are exceptions, of course; Interventional Radiology is a big one, but IR is I think a lot more like Surgery in it's nature than radiology. And when I was on Peds Radiology, we had occasional patient encounters when we were doing GI studies or other hands-on radiology studies. And most importantly of all, the Pediatric Radiology faculty that I worked with were really nice folks. There's always exceptions to every rule. But I guess the real question is, do you really want to be part of a branch of patient care, where you'll very, very rarely ever get to work directly with actual patients?
That was a *huge* factor in my own personal journey. I *came* to medical school in very large part to be a part of the lives of patients, to help them, listen to them, counsel them, answer their questions, support them through their fears and darkest moments, to walk with them from here to victory or death. To be not just their doctor, but their friend. That for me was the whole reason I chose and accepted all the myriad prices and sacrifices of a life given to the profession of medicine. That's why I left behind what would have been a lot easier life in engineering to come to this one. And the biggest strike against Radiology -- which I enjoyed greatly -- or Pathology was precisely that one; I didn't come all this way, sacrifice all this much, just to live behind a computer screen, largely forever peripheral and separated from the lives of the patients I came to help.
Radiologists do have a critical, indispensible role in helping heal patients. But they very, very rarely -- if at all -- ever get to listen to a patient, counsel them, help them with their fears, share in their hopes, celebrate their triumphs. You'll be the guy behind the screen, not beside the bedside. And with a whole professionto choose from, that wasn't what I wanted.
I wish you the best of luck in discovering your own path.
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thanks for your well-thought out prose... always nice to have the perspective of someone a little closer to me in years. i guess the question right now is: do *i* want patient contact? your motivations for going into medicine seem clear, but i'm not too sure if they're the same for me. i guess i still have a few more years to figure it all out...
but thanks again for reading and commenting :)
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