Should i do radiology

I had fun seeing such a variety of pathology, so I thought I would get some experience in the adult emergency department. It was great seeing people with chest pain, stomach aches, foreign bodies in their eye, or problems with any organ, for which the emergency physician was knowledgable, but often had to turn to an expert for help.

I loved the diversity, the pathology and the collaboration, and felt like this was the place for me to be to actually help people. When my PhD ended I was thrown back into the clinical years, and while I enjoyed some aspects of being a general practitioner, I did not love the day-to-day of a clinic.

I enjoyed doing my part to take care of sicker patients in the hospital, but often felt like what I was doing was less acute medical care, and more like accelerated primary care or even social work, adjusting diuretic dosing, arranging consultations, coordinating family meetings, or waiting for a bed to open up in a rehab facility.

But I soon learned I was wrong. By the way, social work is great — my grandfather, an aunt, an uncle and at least one of my cousins are or were social workers. I was set on emergency medicine, and arranged my schedule accordingly so that the first month of my last medical school year was in the emergency department. I had a Friday night shift and was surprised to be working so closely with a social worker on a homeless patient admitted intoxicated with a broken bone, but otherwise entirely well.

The more I worked in the emergency department, the more I realised that emergency medicine practitioners primarily do non-emergency medicine. There was another experience that really changed my outlook.

During a big storm, there were issues with getting lab and radiology reports onto our computer system. The attending emergency medicine physician would not discharge a patient until the laboratory and radiology reports came in. I began to start questioning my clinical career trajectory. Although I had signed up for radiology for my second month as a final year medical student thinking it would help me as an emergency medicine physician , it ended up being a turning point.

I saw how being a radiologist is like being a medical Sherlock Holmes, observing details and patterns and making a coherent story sometimes from only a single image. Sure, there were plenty of negative studies, but there were also studies on some of the sickest patients in the hospital.

I sat down to write a personal statement on why I would make a great emergency medicine physician. After three revisions, none of which were appealing, I decided to try to write my radiology personal statement and just like that, I realised I should be a radiologist!

Radiologists are detail-oriented yet big-picture physicians. During my intern year, I attended a meeting discussing how we could improve patient flow in the emergency department when those patients could be having cardiac ischemia. There were three physicians two emergency medicine physicians and myself , a few nurses, and a bunch of administrators. Maybe in the remote future, machine learning will make radiologists obsolete, but radiologists are safe so long as truck and bus drivers continue to have employment.

If you are worried about robots taking over the world, radiology may not be for you. There is concern that radiology could be outsourced. While this is a legitimate concern for many minimalists or doomsayers, so long as you are better in whatever way be it skill, knowledge, professionalism, personality, etc to the referring clinicians than the others, the clinicians will want to hear your opinion.

Another, more pragmatic reason for choosing rads had to do with its viability as a career-choice. At the time dating myself, here , the Internet was just beginning to hit its stride. It struck me that, probably before any other medical specialty, radiology would be able to leverage such tech.

I expected that it would not be long before a radiologist would be able to read cases from anywhere in the world, no matter where he chose to live or travel. This, I reasoned, would render rads less susceptible to fluctuations in job markets. This has the best lifestyle of all the radiology subspecialties, as there are no breast emergencies requiring overnight call. Pediatric radiology is for those who enjoy the pathology of pediatrics but not necessarily the clinical aspect.

With MSK radiology, your responsibilities will revolve around sports medicine and orthopedics in both diagnosis and management. Body imaging and MRI is the work-horse of radiology and the backbone of the hospital. These are the experts in cross-sectional imaging, meaning CT, MRI, and ultrasound, to diagnose diseases found in the chest, abdomen, and pelvis.

This is a procedure heavy subspecialty, with biopsies, drainages, aspirations, cancer cryoablations, and cancer radiofrequency ablations. Radiology is one of the ROAD lifestyle specialties, standing for radiology, ophthalmology, anesthesiology, and dermatology. Given the lower acuity work environment, the atmosphere is lower stress, and colleagues are more amicable and collegial compared to higher stress specialties.

While some are afraid of artificial intelligence replacing the job of radiologists, it will likely augment and make their job easier rather than outright replace them. This is because as a radiologist, you are less commonly seeing patients in person, but rather remotely through images. Just like its name implies, diagnostic radiology is all about identifying the problem.

If you like the satisfaction of being the one to solve the problem or treat the disease, diagnostic radiology may not be able to provide that for you. How can you decide if radiology is a good field for you? Those who thrive and are happiest in the field tend to be curious and enjoy the intellectual aspect of medicine.

If you like puzzles, radiology is essentially that — the diagnosis is right in front of you, and you simply have to piece together the information to find it. If you value work-life balance with time outside the hospital and high compensation, you can have your cake and eat it too with radiology. But make sure you enjoy the day-to-day of what radiologists deal with — namely, reading images, which may leave some of the more outgoing or adrenaline-fuelled individuals feeling unfulfilled.

If you have a big ego, radiology may not be for you. Big shout out to the radiologists at Med School Insiders that helped me in the creation of this post. There are a lot of misconceptions about General Surgery. This is the reality of general surgery. Join our mailing list to receive MSI exclusives, news, and updates. No spam. One-click unsubscribe. By continuing to use this website, you consent to the use of cookies in accordance with our Cookie Policy.

Toggle navigation. Your Radiologist Your radiologist is a medical doctor who specializes in diagnosing and treating disease and injury, using medical imaging techniques such as x-rays, computed tomography CT , magnetic resonance imaging MRI , nuclear medicine, positron emission tomography PET , fusion imaging, and ultrasound.

Your Radiologist Plays a Key Role in Your Healthcare By: Acting as an expert consultant to your referring physician the doctor who sent you to the radiology department or clinic for testing by aiding him or her in choosing the proper examination, interpreting the resulting medical images, and using test results to direct your care. Treating diseases by means of radiation radiation oncology or minimally invasive, image-guided therapeutic intervention interventional radiology.

Correlating medical image findings with other examinations and tests. Recommending further appropriate examinations or treatments when necessary and conferring with referring physicians. Directing radiologic technologists personnel who operate the equipment in the proper performance of quality exams.

Your Radiologist Has the Right Training, Knowledge, and Experience When your referring doctors tell you they have reviewed your studies, what they usually mean is that they have reviewed the radiology report or gone over the imaging exam with your radiologist. Send us your feedback Did you find the information you were looking for?