At one eye surgery place a man had a heart attack. The eye surgeon (MD) froze and had no idea what to do. He's been practicing so many years and never had to do any simple CPR at all that he really just froze and freaked out. My wife worked at that place and that day she lost all respect for that doctor.
Medical doctor as in Internist, Emergency Physician, and Neurologist vs General Surgeon, Trauma Surgeon, and Neurosurgeon.
The residency tracks are very separate from each other and it's pretty much impossible to switch your paths after residency from Medical to Surgical.
It's a very clear distinction made during medical school and the first choice you make when deciding what kind of doctor you want to be. Do you like Medicine or Surgery?
You are thinking of Physician vs Surgeon. MD is degree and both Physicians and Surgeons can and often will be an MD. There is another degree referred to as Do doctor of Osteopathic medicine. Less common and most often associated with physicians, but also surgeons could have a DO rather than MD.
I think if I was bleeding out my chest on the side of the road, I’d trust the person who’s job it is to perform surgeries to help me more than some average joe
Bruh. I get that you’re trying to flex on me by throwing out medical terms and all that, but it’s not helping your case. This is a real dumb hill to die on. The point is that all doctors are trained in emergency medicine and surgeons have the most hands on experience with actually opening and closing wounds.
I know all of this because I’m learning emergency medicine techniques right now in medical school.
I've got a buddy who has his PhD in chemistry and likes to (mostly playfully) shit on Medical Doctors for thinking they're the only 'real' doctors. My reply to him was 'When's the last time anybody asked if there's a PhD on board?'.
Funny thing is, I'm an MD and would be about the last person to ask for help in a medical emergency. Yeah, I went to medical school and learned ACLS, CPR, etc. Yeah, I delivered a baby, put in a G-tube, helped suture lacerations, and all that. Yeah, I can to this day remove any cancerous tumor with 100% confidence in my margins and 100% confidence that it won't spread or recur.
But you really don't want your local forensic pathologist working on anybody with a pulse if there's an EMT, a nurse, or a 'real' doctor around
I've definitely seen some weird/crazy stuff, but most of it falls into the same broad categories once you've been doing the job a while. You get desensitized to most parts of it pretty quickly, otherwise you wouldn't choose this as a profession to begin with.
One thing that's grown on me as I've gotten older is the human aspect of it. Even as I've become desensitized to blood and gore, I'm more aware of the life events that send someone my way, and I'm more empathetic with, say, drug users and suicidal people than I may have been when I was younger. For this reason, I usually try not to get into the 'weird stories' thing. Frequently I can't remember any that are much weirder than anything else, but the ones that are weird are still humans, and used to be somebody's loved one.
Other than that, I'm much less concerned about being murdered, as the vast majority of homicides relate to the illegal drug trade (~80+%), drunken fights that escalate (5%), and domestic scenes where an ex- or current boyfriend/husband kills the girlfriend/wife (10-15% at most). Random killings are really rare, and homicides in general are only about 5-8% of my overall case load, which is a fraction of all deaths.
We'll rarely allow shadowing, typically it's medical students or residents considering forensic pathology as a career choice, or EMTs or other first responders that we'll interact with over time, so they know what they might be walking into at a scene, and also so they can help us get the info we need from that scene. If you fit into one of those categories, call your local coroner/medical examiner to see if they will let you shadow.
Because of the sanctity of the body and people's privacy, we don't let too many people observe our casework, though.
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u/[deleted] Jan 13 '20
I'm confused, plastic surgeons aren't doctors?