It’s unfortunate that I want to go into family medicine,
because I think the stereotypes about family practitioners are often times
nonsensical. But I suppose it’s also good that both of my parents are kind,
friendly surgeons, so stereotypes about medicine’s specialties don’t really hold
true for me and my family.
So surgery often gets stereotyped as being full of jerks.
And while I think there are a lot of surgeons who seem to have an unnecessary
and occasionally dangerously elevated sense of self-worth, you find that in
other specialties, too, so I don’t think it’s terribly accurate.
Internal medicine people are obnoxious. It’s like they’ve
convinced themselves that what they are doing is interesting, even though
they’re stuck in a hospital all day dealing with dying people.
I want to say people going into radiology, ophthalmology,
and dermatology are all terrible people who are in it for the money instead of really helping people. But that’s not
true. And everybody’s idea of help is different. I don’t know why they’re
interested in their fields, but technically, someone’s got to do it.
Emergency Medicine is full of hipsters. I don’t know how
this happened, but it’s pretty accurate. People who are hipsters, people with
ADHD, and people who get bored easily. As for their personalities, they’ve got
their jerks and their saints, too.
Psychiatrists are indeed
crazy. But I think that’s because if you have a mental illness yourself,
dealing with medical students and physicians in other fields gets incredibly taxing. If I hear one more
person reduce major depression to a simple affair that people should be able to
handle without medicine, I may start applying to psychiatry residencies right
then and there.
Neurology is full of people who are more emotionally stable
than psychiatrists, but are still very, very weird. But understandably so. Like
more professional psychiatrists. Or just more stuffy.
I like pediatricians. But I wouldn’t say they’re the nicest
people in the world. Kids are just more tolerable than most other patient
populations, so it’s easier for them to look happier while they work. Whether
they are or not, nobody knows.
Obstetricians and Gynecologists are exactly like surgeons.
Who will occasionally smile at patients because their patients are neonates.
And that pretty much covers it. Does this effect what I want
to go into? Not really. It just makes me louder about defending my choice to go
into family medicine, which most people seem to think is incredibly boring, despite
the fact that, to me at least, it seems almost as exciting as emergency
medicine (when you remove trauma cases) while also including continuity of
care.
And to me at least, being a doctor means being a family
physician. All other fields just add complexity—necessary or not—to the medical
field.
