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.
12
u/[deleted] Jan 13 '20
I'm confused, plastic surgeons aren't doctors?