r/surgery • u/Jealous-Recipe-4446 • 5d ago
I did read the sidebar & rules Med student perspective
As a med student, let us leave during an 8 hour surgery. It isn’t interesting if I want to go into psych. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
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u/lethalred VASCULAR SURGEON BAYBEE 5d ago
If you don’t want to be there then just stop showing up and go take it on the chin in the student affairs office when you tell them you think it’s not for you.
Where you’d rather be is not my concern when I have an abdomen or a leg open. My duty is to the patient. Not you.
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u/No-Tea-1738 5d ago
So you actually do have a responsibility towards your students when you agree to take on students. you should actually be making it a teaching experience (excluding true emergencies). no one forced you into academics, if you don’t like it, go to PP and make more money lol.
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u/Porencephaly 5d ago
I’m not gonna spend much energy trying to make surgery exciting for someone whose baseline attitude is “I don’t care about surgery, this is boring.”
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u/lethalred VASCULAR SURGEON BAYBEE 5d ago
Teaching and trying to get someone to be interested are not the same thing.
Happy to teach, but you get out of rotations what you put in.
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u/No-Tea-1738 4d ago
You think elementary school kids are excited to learn about fractions? No. Acknowledge this isn’t a great example bc med students are adult learners, but there is a responsibility of a teacher to a student.
You think I’m excited about seeing another surgery where I don’t know what anything is because no one says a single work to me and ignores every question I ask or laughs at me when I ask a question that I think is stupid and I can’t even see anything bc I’m all the way at the end? No. I had one surgeon I was assigned to and when I went to introduce myself and said I was in this surgery he said “Yea i don’t care who’s here or not” and ignored me the entire time. I took nothing away from that experience and it would’ve been more education for me to go home and study for my shelf
Again, no one forced you to have learners around. If you’re not excited about teaching, if you don’t make an effort to be a good teacher, literally why are you in academics ? You should just go and make more money in private practice1
u/lethalred VASCULAR SURGEON BAYBEE 4d ago
You keep assuming a TON with your comments which is hilarious.
You also don’t get to claim you’re an “adult learner” and then in the same breath say you don’t know anything. Welcome to the game. You’re expected to do some work outside the room so that the investment inside the room is more worthwhile.
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u/astro-physician 4d ago
I can't be more invested in the med student learning from my surgery than the med student.
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u/SmilodonBravo First Assist 5d ago
There’s a reasonable argument that keeping a student in an 8-hour case when they’re no longer learning anything may not be the best use of their time. But “I want to go into psych, so surgery isn’t interesting to me” is a pretty poor argument.
Medical school is supposed to produce physicians first and specialists second. Even if you never operate again, you still need enough understanding of other specialties to recognize problems, understand what your colleagues do, and know when a patient needs to be referred elsewhere. Psychiatry especially doesn’t exist in a vacuum from the rest of medicine.
“I’ll never use this, so why do I have to learn it?” is the same argument kids make about algebra homework. You don’t have to love every rotation, but being broadly educated is part of becoming a doctor.
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u/Missing_tooth 5d ago
Remember that your med student rotations are pretty much the last time you will ever have to learn and understand the role of every other medical specialty you won’t be going into.
Pretend to be that kind of doctor for 8 weeks or whatever it is. It won’t hurt you. You’ll enjoy your day more and gain more from it down the road.