Anesthesiologists: There are no substitutes

Dr. Wesam Farid MousaAssisstant Professor Anesthesia & ICU

Dammam Hospital of the University

 Choosing Your Medical Specialty

What is ….. Anesthesia?

Anesthesia, or anaesthesia (from Greek an-, "without"; and aisthēsis, "sensation"). The word anesthesia was suggested by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. in 1846

Anesthesia: means the condition of having sensation temporarily blocked

Types of anesthesia include local anesthesia, regional anesthesia and general anesthesia

General anesthesia is a pharmacologically induced and reversible state of loss of responsiveness amnesia, analgesia, loss of skeletal muscle reflexes and decreased stress response

Beside anesthesia, there is a greater involvement of anesthesiologists in the intensive care unit and pain clinic that’s why, anesthesiology is rapidly acquiring a highly competitive status

Anesthesia specialty is neither medical nor surgical—it functions independently as a supportive discipline of medicine.

Although not front-line doctors, anesthesia physicians still play a crucial role in patient care.

Without them, patients would not make it through surgery alive.

Because of their anonymous roles and minimal patient contact, these behind-the-scenes doctors tend not to get the recognition they deserve from their patients. Without external rewards, they instead have to derive their professional satisfaction from within.

Anesthesiology at its core is applied physiology and pharmacology

In contrast to internal medicine, the feedback for your medical decisions is much more immediate

There is an element of technical proficiency, and a learning curve that goes with it

You can see how the analogy might work. The anesthesiologist is trying to keep the patient alive while the surgeon (i.e. the striker) is slicing and dicing

Anesthesiology offers a favorable compromise between compensation (still fairly high), time spent each week (relatively low) and call schedule (not very intense) and offer a relatively decent lifestyle.

How is the future of Anesthesia

… ?

Future repayment is an influential factor in some students’ decisions to enter a given specialty.

Sometimes, new physicians are avoiding the primary care fields because of their low earning potential.

Others lean toward specialties that give high starting salaries, like radiology, anesthesiology, and orthopedic surgery.

But once credits are out of the picture, remember that you will practice in that specialty for the rest of your professional life.

For that reason, salary should be only a less influential variable. No amount of income can make up for a lifetime of miserable days in the wrong specialty.

The aforementioned recent changes within anesthesiology illustrate an important take-home point. In this case, the miscalculation of demand in an influential study, combined with declining incomes, left students fearful of selecting this field.

It is hard to make career plans in an uncertain economic world. When choosing their dream specialty, students should pay little heed to its current or projected state of job opportunities.

After all, have you ever heard of any unemployed, starving physicians?

Pros and Cons

In fields like emergency medicine and anesthesiology, contact with the patient is typically short and to the point.

You should decide how much patient contact you want in your career and rule out specialties that may not meet your needs.

If long-term relationships and continuity of care are important, consider areas like internal medicine and family practice.

• Anesthesiologist is like a sweeper football defender that mindset of preventing "bad" things from happening. He has to coordinate himself and understand where the threats are coming from. He has a near complete field of vision and will communicate what he sees to his players. He is also the last line of defense before the keeper.

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At the most fundamental level, with all other factors aside, medical students should love the intellectual content of their specialty.

If you love clinical pharmacology and physiology, then perhaps a career in anesthesiology is your destiny.

If studying anatomy brings up bad memories from your first year of medical school, then stay away from surgical specialties, radiology, and pathology.

Above all, you should never have to force yourself to love an area of medicine.

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If you like getting down and soiled, think about careers in emergency medicine, obstetrics-gynecology, and surgery.

In some specialties, like urology and orthopedic surgery, doctors only have to perform focused physicals (instead of examining everything).

Cleaner specialties—those with lots of patient interaction but not much physical contact—include psychiatry, ophthalmology, and radiation oncology.

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If nothing else works, consider this:

Write down every specialty you’re considering on a slip of paper, and mix them up into a hat Decide that the one you pick will be the one you do

Then pick

If you’re disappointed, then you don’t want to do it! Good way of narrowing stuff down, sometimes, when all else is equal

Best of luck!