Orthopaedic surgery and plastics are very similar in that they offer immediate gratification, good patient outcomes, hands on with minimal medical management and a good lifestyle as an attending/consultant. Plastic surgery is basically the orthopedic surgery for people who are more OCD. Which explains why Kevin did plastics instead 😂
You do realize ortho is still a surgical field? By the time you're going to be having a 'good lifestyle' you'll be 40+, after accounting for post-fellowship private practice grind @@Human-wi7qx
I'm currently aspiring to become an orthopedic surgeon with a subspecialty in Sports Medicine! But the more I shadow other specialties, the more I get interested in them so who knows where I'll end up in in 4 years haha
If you go in ortho, you need to really love trauma cases. Makes for a lot of the practice. The bread and butter of orthopedic surgery is trauma cases. Nothing wrong with subspecialties but don't decide your residency on subspecialty interest, make sure you love the bread and butter of your future career !
I think third year rotations on ortho don’t do the complexity of the specialty justice. For me the hardest part of internal medicine for example was reading an EKG as a medical student. However, If you look at a complex pilon or shatzker, trying to use a CT to imagine how you are going to try and re-approximate the fracture to give the joint the best outcome is very nuanced like watching a seasoned cardiologist read a ekg. Similar complexity but different. Just my two cents.
I think taht remark would probably be true for many of these if you judge them just based on your impression from a clinical rotation! If you develop expert knowledge over a long career in your field, you do far more than just apply the basics, you develop a certain intuition and pay attention to detail that improves outcomes immensely.
Orthopedic spine surgery can be pretty complex and not all bones - spinal decompressions/fusions. Also hand replant is bones, ligaments, tendons, vessels; microsurgery; putting a finger or hand back on is extremely detailed, complex. And it takes all night.
General public understanding is something I envy about ortho. I've met 80 year olds who remember how many plates and screws it took to fix their arm as a 20 year old, but can't remember whether they have a uterus or not when recounting a surgical history. Virtually no procedures in general, vascular, gynecologic or otolaryngologic surgery are readily grasped by the general public. You have to reveal to the patient they even have the organ you intend to operate on before struggling to explain in what way it's diseased and how you intend to address it. Additionally, most ortho procedures have fewer serious adverse events than many other surgical fields. Spine is probably the exception
I've said for years I'd love to do ortho surgery, but I have sensory integration issues that make it a problem for me to use loud/power tools most of the time, and I can't generally predict what days I'll have a better tolerance. :( Used to joke that I'd be like "Nurse! Bring me my shock-absorption gloves and fuzzy earmuffs!" lol. Thankfully the auditory/vibrations issues are improving as I age, buuuut even more thankfully, I'm now pretty sure that I'm more passionate about emergency medicine anyway 😂 Still will get to enjoy a good chunk of ortho case involvement, and I just love being a generalist anyway and I don't think it gets more general than emergency (apart from family, and screw that)
Orthopedics is brutal, bone chips flying everywhere like sparks from a grindstone. Why would you want to do that barbaric work when you could command a seal team while painting beautiful anastomoses like a pointilist as a CT surgeon?
Really great video! Personally, for me, having things be straight forward and uncomplicated would be a plus. Could you do a video, in this series, related to cardiothoracic surgery?
I liked the point of the video. But I disagree! The truth is there is so little education in medical school about musculoskeletal pathology (it's not even a unit during physiology) and as a medical student on ortho, it's hard to grasp all the nuances and intricacies of each surgery because it seems so distanced from what you spent 2 years learning. Modern medical education was shaped to produce doctors that can treat the most common and life threatening problems in our population but musculoskeletal disease is usually chronic and rarely life threatening. Complex limb deformity is extremely nuanced. So is trauma actually (there is a LOT of engineering that goes into the design of modern fracture implants, down to each thread on the screws). Don't even get me started on arthroplasty design.
As a FMG, NO MATTER WHAT, it’s not easy for you to pick and choose Otho, plastic surgery, neuro surgery, interventional radiology or any other highly competitive specialties .
I think people put too much time into figuring out what the best specialty for them will be when in all likelihood there's probably like a 5 to 10% happiness difference between all of them
Listen, folks. This is all very appealing. But, there's only one reason anyone goes into ortho...the bucks. The bucks are good. The hospital administrators won't screw with you because you bring in the dough for them as well. You are basically not accountable to anyone other than your stock broker. Anything else you say about this specialty and why people go into it is just rubbish. Now you know.
@@kevinjubbalmd I just want folks to remember that the higher you go in income bracket in medicine, the higher your grades have to be. I've never known anyone who graduated in or near the top of the class who did not go into a lucrative, i.e., money, specialty. Not a single one. That says all you need to know about these folks. Am I saying they're sharks. No, I'm saying they're great whites.
@@kevinjubbalmd I'm an M.D. (retired). I've been around doctors most of my adult life. This is what I have to say to you: You are obviously a very gifted physician. I don't have even half of your brains and ability, but none-the-less, I believe that what you don't know is A LOT.
As a PM&R doc (Physiatrist), back during my residency in the late '90s I had to do a short Ortho rotation during my internship year. One of the older (Caucasian, male) attendings told me that he was disappointed that there were so few women in Ortho. 25 years later, just a couple of months ago I had an Ortho who I interacted with about a case tell me that he remains disappointed at the lack of diversity in Ortho. At the time of my rotation most of the residents I dealt with were outwardly major jerks, but within the first couple of days of my rotation little 4'11" me stood up to them (I will of course do my share but no, I am not doing every other night call on YOUR service when this was an elective and I contacted you several weeks ago to confirm my schedule/obligations and you never contacted me...I am NOT running around being the only one to round with YOUR attendings while you, including interns at the same level of training as me but in your own department, all sit and have your 3rd breakfast of the morning down in the cafeteria) and miraculously was treated great for the rest of the rotation and learned a lot. I found out over time that they typically pulled this on the women rotators from our department as well as the more soft spoken, gentle guys (actually made a few of the women cry!!). I also was told by my department chairman (one of the people I respect most looking back on my career/life) that he was never respected by Orthos because they immediately perceived him as week simply because he was short/small. For whatever reason, their culture is such that you have to show a certain strength and command a basic level of respect or they will want to eat you alive. I'm not sure they even do it INTENTIONALLY, per se....it's just their way of doing things. All of the specialty stereotypes are of course generalizations, but have some grain of truth. When choosing a specialty, you have to look for where you truly fit in...you can't worry about which specialty is supposedly most prestigious or the exact salary or you'll be sorely disappointed. I certainly don't know him personally and could be wrong, but I have a feeling that's what happened to Kevin...he couldn't bring himself to pick a specialty that he considered less prestigious or competitive but that had a different lifestyle that might have better accommodated his additional entrepreneurial interests/aspirations.
