January 5, 2008

• Getting Crazy

  Ahh and its back to work…sort of. You see, after having completed rotations in internal medicine, family medicine, emergency medicine, and surgery, my first rotation of the new year is psychiatry.

  And working in psychiatry is not in quite the same class of work ethic. Now for 6 weeks, it is going to be great to chat with schizophrenics and veterans, hearing war stories and the like. However, psychiatry as a field seems basically like babysitting. Very few people get better, if any, and the main job to to simply talk to the person to evaluate their mental status du jour

  One of the attendings said it best during grand rounds- “In Psychiatry we are not treating the person, we are treating the disease. It is just inconvenient that these diseases happen to reside in people”

  And while I am looking forward to 6 weeks of rather kickback work and low expectations, I must admit that if I went into a specialty that did not require a stethoscope, physical exam, or white coat, i would kind of feel like i had thrown away my medical degree. Well, lets see how things go, shall we?
  

  

  • 4:06 pm
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