Monthly Archives: February 2007

MSH Specialty Selection: Pediatrics

Specialty SelectionWe’re going to kick of the MSH Specialty Selection Series with a look into Pediatrics. Since I haven’t really given you the lowdown on the specialty selection series, here’s a little introduction.

I want to look at specialties with regards to average salaries, hours worked weekly, overall lifestyle factors, physician satisfaction, and residency training requirements. I’ll be using survey information that can be freely found on the net as well as my personal experiences while rotating through these specialties and contact with my friends who are now residents. I personally know someone from most of the major specialties. If I have any questions, I’ll be sure to ask them so that I can give you guys a thorough review of the specialty. Unfortunately, some of the salary information is slightly dated, but it will still give you an idea of what to expect.

I’m going to cover all of the popular specialties, but probably won’t get too much into fellowships, as these are far down the road from where most of you guys are anyway. If you’d like to request a specialty review, please comment in this post and let me know.

Now, let’s get a closer look into Pediatrics.

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Crazy Soccer Moms

My wife and I were driving to a restaurant tonight on a four-lane highway. I’m in the right-hand lane cruising along, and there’s another car in the left hand lane just up close enough so that I can’t get over.

I see some room ahead of me, so I ease on the gas a bit and signal that I’m going to change lanes. As soon as I speed up to get some distance, the car in the left hand lane speeds up as well, preventing me from merging over.

“OK, no big deal” I thought. A few minutes go by and I see another opportunity to make a little bit of distance and merge into the left lane. Same shit happens: As soon as I speed up to make room, this jackass speeds up also. I briefly signal and jam my way into the left hand lane. Yeah, I cut the car off but it was nothing excessive. I had plenty of room or else I wouldn’t have came over.

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Top Links 2/16/07

An SDN forum member discusses her bad experience on her OB/GYN rotation in this thread while another student is contemplating not attending his graduation. The process of becoming a physician isn’t all rainbows and butterflies.

Panda Bear discusses ten things he likes about his job, which shows that there might be light at the end of the tunnel for some.

Rumorsweretrue outlines some of the errors found in First Aid for the USMLE Step I pulmonary section, which should come in handy for those of you preparing for that bitch of an exam.

Have a good weekend.

Grey’s Anatomy: They Really Do Work Long Hours

Most of you probably watch some medical drama shows on TV. First there was ER, and now it seems that every other show on television has something to do with medicine. Right now, the three biggest shows are probably Grey’s Anatomy, ER, and House, M.D.

I really like Grey’s Anatomy. I never got into ER or House too much, but I’ve seen each of them on more than one occasion. I don’t care for the more comedic shows like ‘Scrubs’ at all.

In my opinion, Grey’s Anatomy is the most ‘releastic’ of all medical shows on T.V. House is too far-fetched with bizarre and rather rare diagnoses. E.R. is not representative of my brief experiences in the emergency department during my student rotations.

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Shared Hosting Causing Problems

It seems that somebody on this web server doesn’t know how to use their .htaccess redirects properly. As a result, my entire server is getting 500 internal server errors. I know the site has been down briefly today and yesterday. I’m currently talking with support to see if I can get something done about the downtime. It not only affects this site, but my whole network of sites.

Update: The new release of WordPress has a bug in a file responsible for ‘pinging’ whenever a new post is written. It’s now sorted (I think), so we should be good to go.