What can you tell me about diagnostic medicine (the field and how to enter it)?

Question

I have to do an essay on where I plan to be in ten years, and this is it. But the essay's purpose is to gain entrance to a really good school, and I have to fax my application tomorrow, so i need info fast. Just about anything would be useful.

Of course I still want to be a doctor. Have wanted it since I was three, and I'm not changing my mind now.

Answer 1

Oooh - that's so cool! My dad wanted to become a plastic surgeon at age 11 and worked steadily towards it. He is very successful. I just sort of floated into it cos I got good grades and not being too fussed about anything and being able to manage most situations I wound up in Emergency Medicine.

Okay - diagnostic medicine is really the province of the physician. There are various brands of physician depending on which organ system you are interested in: heart (cardiology), brain and nerves (neurology), digestive tract (gastroenterology) etc.

There are also general physicians who accept patients of pretty much any description (so long as they don't have an obvious surgical problem) and gerontologists (geriatricians) who do the same thing in the elderly population - juggling the multiple extra issues faced by the elderly.

Note that paediatrics is essentially a diagnostic medicine field as well, but it seems to have evolved quite separately from the rest of the physicians.

In the USA, my understanding is that you do a pre-med course (4 years) and then your medical degree (another 4 years) and at the end you wind up in an internship.

There seems to be competition for selecting an internship in a prestigious hospital which does a lot of whatever it is you are interested in entering - you'll find the medical specialties in most of the major hospitals - but it seems to be the thing of getting accepted by a place with the big names in those fields, becoming known to the right people etc.

Once you do your internship then there must be some process to apply to the relevant college you are interested in and off you go.

In Australia, the process is similar. You do a 6 year undergraduate degree or a 7-8 year post graduate degree (similar to the USA premed/med set up) and then you do internship. It doesn't really matter so much about your internship year, although the people who are REALLY driven do try to select their hospital according to what they want to wind up doing. Usually our internships are well rounded in Australia. You will do 1 term of medical, 1 term of surgical, 1 term of "service" jobs - ie. nights or relieving, and 1-2 terms of something else ... psych, anaesthetics, OBGYN, paeds, GP - rural medicine, etc. occasionally getting an extra medical or surgical rotation.

It's with these extras that the really focussed people try to get a bit of a leg up - if you were dead set on paediatrics you'd try and get a paeds term in your internship etc - if you were dead set on neurology, you'd try to negotiate for an extra neurology term or something (?radiology to try and get into CT and MRI and neuroradiology).

Once you do your internship, you get a few years of residency to either stuff around and try different rotations or declare your intentions and try to focus your rotations into the area of your main interest.

Then you apply to the college - write them a letter - they'll write back and let you know about fees and the college guidelines etc. You'll have many representatives of that college in the hospital normally and they can help you along.

Then there are the college exams. Physicians in RACP usually have a single entrance exam they need to pass to get into advanced training. Then it's advanced training - time spent in various rotations - some service jobs - and eventually voila you are a physician once you have fulfilled the college requirements.

Answer 2

The television show "House" seems to have generated a lot of questions like this. There isn't really such a specialty, but general internal medicine in a teaching slot can come pretty close. Or pediatrics, for that age group.

Answer 3

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Answer 4

doctors diagnose. Do brillinatly at school, be a caring, community-minded perosn, go to med school, bankrupt yourself for two decades, work your b--tt off for seven years, get a grindingly difiicult job where you are at everyon'e beckand call for ever and will be sued if you ever miss someonthing though never thankes for all the kazillions of things you do right. Still wanna be a doctor?