Stereotypes in Medicine

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.