Talks

Like grad students, medical students develop a keen magnetic sense of free food at various talks. Pizza places must love us. I attended a panel discussion on primary care a week ago. It focused on allergy, immunology, rheumatology, and infectious disease. The lifestyles for those specialties is not bad, but the salary is relatively low. They love doing it though. A specialty like infectious disease ("fx dz" or "ID") requires someone really smart for tough differential diagnoses. It also puts the physician in a position to affect large amounts of people through policy, community health (such as HIV in San Francisco), international work, and regular patient care. Rheumatology deals with systemic inflammatory diseases like arthritis, and it's appeal for me is its systemic basis; I like thinking of the body as a whole. I remain interested and undecided about specialties. I learned a lot about the role of primary care and those particular disciplines, though, so it was a good panel.

I also attended a research presentation by the department head of Pathology here. It was a good presentation on current clinical trial issues, basic immunology, and the specific research the professor was interested in. I think that from hearing all these people, I have realized you can't do the triad of teaching, researching, and clinical medicine for long periods of time unless you don't sleep or have 30 hours in a day or something. His research was definitely interesting, and he teaches some of our core classes, so I enjoyed it a lot.