Going to med school and becoming a surgeon when you're older

A 34-year-old attorney writes I have a good salary, am married, and have two children. My whole life I've been drawn to medicine (I'm an EMT, have experience on the job with trauma related injuries, etc.) and have always enjoyed it. However, I have a Bachelor's in English literature, so I've always put it as unattainable to become a doctor. Now, once again, I'm considering doing one of the post bac premed programs out there and going for it.

Am I insane? At my age, I'll likely be 41-42 by the time I'd complete medical school, then residency. I'd love your opinion.

Let's do some math. You are 34. Most post bac premed programs take at least a year if you go to school full-time. Assuming you can get into a program this summer, you will be applying to medical school for a class starting in the fall of 2017. You will be 36 years old when you start.

Four years of medical school plus five years of general surgery residency and you will be 45 years old. If you want to take a fellowship in something for a year or two, add those years on.

What are you going to do for income while you are pursuing your medical degree? And let's not forget the tuition cost of the post bac program and medical school, living expenses, and your paltry salary for the 5 years of your residency.

I wrote a post about this four years ago. It was about a then 30-year-old man did not get into medical school until 2014 which means he is now in the middle of his first year at the age of 34.

My discussion of the "cons" of doing this is much more expansive in that post. Just remember that tuition costs have risen much faster than inflation and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.

I can't tell you not to do it and it certainly has been done by others, but I strongly advise you to give it a lot of thought.

He replies Thanks for the response. Unfortunately, you paint the bleak reality I was afraid of. As I likely won't make cutoffs for the good post bac programs this year, you'd have to add another year to the equation.

What if I went for a less rigorous residency like emergency medicine? Or what if I consider having the military pay for medical school?

Does this change anything? Your post is so bleak, it definitely gives pause.

The family issue is a tough one. I'm fortunate to have about $200k in liquid assets, but it's still a big financial hardship.

$200K might just about cover your tuition for the post bac year and 4 years of med school.

Yes, emergency medicine will save you a couple of years, but it is very competitive.

Remember one thing about the military. Once you are in, they own you. They can send you to remote bases in the states, Afghanistan, or wherever they want. You cannot believe anything they tell about your ability to choose an assignment.

Readers, please comment if you agree or disagree.

Academic vs. community hospital for surgery residency

Here's question from a senior med student at a state school. She has excellent grades, USMLE Step 1 and 2 scores > 245, has co-authored 4 published papers, and was elected to AOA. She writes

I am looking to re-locate to a large city for residency as a number of my family members live there. I have interviewed at the large academic centers in the city as well as their community affiliates. I have also been involved in research and always assumed I would enjoy the biggest "named" institution possible. As I have interviewed, I truly feel that I would get better training (and be happier) and the academic-affiliated community programs in that city. However I have been told my several advisors at my home school that this would be "career suicide" and it would be "idiotic" not to take the best name that I have a chance at matching at. As far as fellowship, I have literally no idea what I want to do. Maybe surgical oncology, maybe transplant? Maybe vascular, maybe nothing?!

What is your insight into this? Should I seek what I perceive to be the best training/fit or should I rank the higher name academic programs for the sake of my career?

Here's my opinion. Be advised that it is strictly my opinion and may be neither popular or correct.

You should have no problem matching at any affiliated community hospital program and probably have a very good chance to match at every academic program in the city you want to be in.

I hope you have properly researched your top choices and are confident that the residents are happy and doing a lot of cases. Also you should be sure that the leadership of the program is stable. I suppose your mentors your school want you to take the academic track because that's what they did. It also enhances the reputation of the school when its students match in big name programs.

You remind me of me except I didn't have the publications you do. I took the "comfortable" choice for residency and never regretted it. I trained in the same city you are looking at. It's a great place to live.

I see it this way. Suppose after a couple of years in a community program, you decide you want to be an academic surgeon. After you residency, you can always take a fellowship in something at an academic medical center.

But if you go with a university program and are miserable, then what do you do? Five years (plus a year or two of research) is a long time to be miserable.

I went into more detail about this in a post three years ago.

Listen to your heart. Go for the place that you feel most comfortable with.

I strongly suggest ranking all of the programs you feel you can live with—just in case.

Good luck and let us know how it turns out.




Readers, feel free to disagree or agree as you see fit.

Board passage rates and residency program quality

I am 3rd year med student thinking of surgery programs to apply to next year. I came across this document on the American Board of Surgery website. It shows the qualifying exam and certifying exam first-time pass rates for general surgery residents between 2008-2013.

Is this a worthwhile marker for evaluating surgery programs and identifying top programs? Also, is first-time pass/fail on the QE/CE a measure of preparation to practice as a general surgeon upon graduation or is it poorly correlated with a graduate's ability to function independently?

I have a moderately competitive Step 1 score and I want to choose a program that would make me a general surgeon without needing to take a fellowship upon graduation.

[Note: The email was edited for length.] 

Thanks for asking a couple of really good questions. The answers are not black and white. On page 23 of its requirements, the Residency Review Committee (RRC) for Surgery states that board passage rate is one measure for evaluating program effectiveness, and "At minimum, for the most recent five-year period, 65% of the graduates must pass each of the qualifying and certifying examinations on the first attempt."

A quick look at the board passage rates in the ABS document shows that 31% of programs, most of which are community hospital-based, did not reach the magic 65% quota.

Two years ago, I blogged about the two major reasons why the 65% board passage threshold on the first try discriminates against community hospital programs. You can read the full piece here, but briefly one issue is that university hospitals attract smarter residents who are better test takers, and the other is that smaller programs are statistically more likely to have test result outliers.

I am unaware of any correlation between passing the boards on the first try (or the second or third tries) and a surgeon's ability to practice independently. In fact, another post I wrote discussed a paper that surveyed 4882 surgical residents. It found that community hospital trainees were more satisfied with their operative experience and more confident that they could work independently than those who trained in university programs.

But there is another consideration. Fair or not, programs with first-time board passage rates chronically below 65% are at some risk for both RRC probation, which is detrimental to recruiting, and possible discontinuation. It is difficult to quickly turn around a low board passage rate because the number of graduates is small in most community programs and the stain left by a failed first-time taker lasts five years.

So what should you do?

Perhaps you should play it safe and apply to community hospital programs with adequate first-time board passage rates.

Comments from surgical educators, current residents or recent graduates of surgical training are welcome.

What do students do on third-year surgery rotations?

A woman who has been accepted by a few medical schools and is trying to decide which one to choose asks

What extent of involvement should be expected for medical school surgery rotations? I have enjoyed shadowing general surgery and feel that a field involving some procedure may end up being my fit, or at the very least something to enjoy in medical school. I am curious as to the type of participation in procedures (suturing/closing for example) that is typically allowed as a student versus that allowed and expected as a resident. 

In most third-year surgery rotations, students can do some suturing of skin and maybe lacerations in the ED provided the student has practiced knot-tying and using instruments outside of the OR. Opportunities to suture in the OR are fewer these days because of skin stapling and the use of glue, which are both faster than suturing. Hardworking and interested students are far more likely to be rewarded with things to do by residents.

Otherwise, there's a lot of camera holding for laparoscopic cases and retracting for open cases. Students used to do H&Ps and write postop orders but the electronic medical record has curtailed those activities greatly.

Medical school has changed a lot over the years. As a fourth-year student in the early 1970s, I placed many subclavian central venous catheters—some of which were unsupervised. Six years ago, I was about to let an intern place a subcutaneous chemotherapy port in the OR. It was halfway through the academic year. I asked her how many subclavian catheterizations she had done. She said she hadn't done any but had seen one.

I can't say whether that lack of experience is common to most current med students, but I think it may be.

Of course, residents get to do much more as they progress through the years. Residents in community hospital programs tend to do more cases during their first 2 years and often will have performed more cases over the 5-year course of residency training than those in pure university based programs. Of course, there are exceptions.

If this is really a major factor in your decision-making process, I suggest you try to talk to some students at the schools that you have been accepted by and see what they have been able to do during their third-year surgery rotations.

You will probably find that students who do third-year clerkships at community hospitals affiliated with med schools get to do more hands-on work too.

The same goes for those applying to residency. If you really want to know what goes on, talk to some of the residents who weren't chosen to meet the applicants on interview day.

I hope some of our readers will comment.

A med student loves open surgery, asks about the future of pediatric surgery

Dimitar [not his real name] writes [edited for length]: I am a medical student who has already applied to the field of general surgery and finished the interview process. I hope to become a pediatric surgeon because it is one of the last fields that allows for one to operate all over the human body and to be a true general surgeon.

However I have been struggling with something that I hope you can help me with. I love the technical aspect of surgery. I enjoy becoming better at tying knots, suturing, and various surgical skills, and above all I love traditional open procedures. I like to feel with my hands and not with those laparoscopic instruments, I like to see with my own eyes and not through a tiny little camera all through a tiny little port. My biggest fear is that everything will become robotic, and that an open procedure will be a rarity in the future. And pediatric surgery most of all is basically an advanced laparoscopic fellowship. I want to make clear that I do not hate laparoscopy, I just enjoy the open procedures much more. I understand that this is probably a very selfish thought as laparoscopy has better recovery times, less pain, shorter hospital stay etc., but I guess that is why we have websites like this where I can ask anonymously what I am to ashamed to asked in public with hopes of getting a non-judgmental response.

To sum it up, I feel like I was born to do surgery back in 1950 or something when everything was open. I would like to find a field that would allow me to operate all over the body and do it the traditional way. Other than trauma, and transplant, what are my options? Would general surgery ever get back to what is was before? If I don't learn to love this laparoscopic and robotic thing am I screwed?

Those are very good questions. Let's start with your worry that pediatric surgery "is basically an advanced laparoscopic fellowship." I'm not so sure about that. If you look at the statistics for residents who finished pediatric surgery fellowships in 2013, you will find that many open cases are being done. This link gives you all the information you need. By my estimation, more than half of all pediatric surgery cases done by fellows were open. That's the good news.

For some bad news, you need to get the full text of this American Journal of Surgery paper that appeared online in November 2013. Written by some senior pediatric surgeons, it gives some worrying information about the specialty of pediatric surgery. The number of complex cases being done by attending pediatric surgeons has remained static while the number of pediatric surgeons has increased. It looks like many pediatric surgeons, even in university hospitals, aren't doing enough complex surgery.

The other bit of bad news is that competition for pediatric surgery fellowship positions remains intense. Here are some data from the last five matches.

As you can see the number of applicants for each position ranges from 1.5 to 2, and the number of unmatched applicants is rather high.

Trauma surgery is not the answer. There are so few open trauma cases being done that in order for trauma surgeons to maintain their skills, the specialty has morphed into "trauma, critical care, and acute care surgery."

I may be wrong, but I don't see general surgery ever returning to the old days where open surgery ruled. Not only that, I think in the future more and more cases will be done with minimally invasive techniques, even if the robot turns out to be a bust.

So in answer to your final question, I think you will have a problem if you do not learn to love the laparoscopic approach.

I wish you the best of luck.

Umbilical hernia repair: Choosing a surgeon and more

A reader writes (in italics). My comments are in normal text.

 

I am writing on behalf of an otherwise healthy 30-ish-year-old relative, who was recently diagnosed with an umbilical hernia, and another “just above it”.

She was diagnosed about a month ago, and was sent to see a surgeon (not sure what kind). The surgeon suggested a repair using mesh. She’s apprehensive moving forward with surgery based upon several reasons:

She felt rushed during the consultation. She wasn’t given much information regarding the procedure, wasn’t prepared with many questions, and failed to voice her questions/concerns. She has since tried to contact the office to get some questions answered but hasn’t gotten a response.

This is not medical advice. For that, I would need to examine your sister.

It was probably a general surgeon. You have mentioned three red flags—she felt rushed, she wasn't given much information, and the office has not called her back. I would suggest you get another surgeon.

She consulted Google and has read “bad things” online. She is concerned with the probability of having to have repeat surgeries.

Recurrence may occur after any hernia operation. For a small umbilical hernia, the risk should not exceed 5%. The infection rate for umbilical hernia repair is also fairly low, but if an infection occurs, a recurrence is likely.

Can you offer real information regarding the types of procedures out there? Are there superior methods, as suggested by many of the “scholarly” looking articles, which eventually turn into advertisements? Many tout methods such as Shouldice, Bassini/McVay, Tension-Free, etc. The info I have come across is conflicting and confusing.

The information on the Internet is confusing. The methods you mentioned are eponyms for groin hernia operations. They do not pertain to umbilical hernia repairs. There are three currently accepted methods of repairing an umbilical hernia—open suture repair, open mesh repair, and laparoscopic mesh repair. The mesh repairs involve insertion of a piece of artificial material to reinforce the abdominal wall. The theory is that the patient's tissue broke down once so why rely on it to fix the hernia? Recurrence rates (at least rates that are published) tend to be significantly lower when mesh is used.

I am unaware if there is a hernia sub-specialty, but if there is, what would be the best way to find such a surgeon? If not, is there an existing database that provides information that details the number of hernia surgeries performed by a surgeon?

There are some surgeons who specialize in repairing hernias. I don't know of a database listing the number of hernia operations performed by individual surgeons, nor is there any information on individual surgeons' recurrence rates. The latter information is usually unknown even to the surgeon because patients with recurrences tend to go elsewhere for repeat surgery.

Can you list questions she should ask her surgeon that will aid her confidence in the decision-making process? Her pain symptoms started about 2 years ago, and I fear what she risks by continuing to delay.

Questions that should be asked include the following: what type of repair should I have, how many of these repairs have you done, do you know your recurrence rate, what if I need to contact you at night or on a weekend.

Because she is symptomatic, she probably should have elective surgery. Not having surgery runs the risk of incarceration, or the trapping of a piece of intestine in the hernia. If this happens, pain would be severe and the hernia would not be reducible. Emergency surgery would be required and the risk of recurrence would be higher. If the bowel's blood supply is irreversibly damaged, some of it may need to be removed. This also increases the risk of complications.

I would find another surgeon to do the operation, preferably a general surgeon with expertise in hernia repairs. If the two hernias are not close together, the laparoscopic method might be best provided she has not had extensive prior abdominal surgery.

I hope this helps.