As residency application season rapidly approaches, I’ve gotten into similar conversations with many friends about why they’re choosing a particular specialty, and one particular theme keeps coming out:

In subspecialty outpatient clinics, there’s more time to spend with patients: visits are usually scheduled as 30 minutes long.

In a world where we’re trained in primary care clinics at the pace that our attendings can keep up with (15 minutes per visit) and we’re feeling completely overwhelmed by trying to address the patient’s hypertension, diabetes, hyperlipidemia, peripheral neuropathy, prior MI, stroke, and liver disease (not to mention learning all the drugs and dosages), of course we like the specialties where we have more time to figure out all our patients problems.

(I’d also argue that we got into medicine to help patients, not just cure their diseases–and that medical students, just like residents and attendings, prefer to have the time to get to know our patients as people, not just as the guy with poorly controlled diabetes with hemoglobin A1C’s in the 10-12 range.)

6 Comments »