What type of field should I be looking into?

Bigredmed
Fri, 06 Feb 2009 20:20:29 +0000

Well do you want to deal with patients?

To get it as basic as possible, physicians diagnose and treat patients. Researchers do research.

Certainly there are many MD’s who participate in research activities, but the thrust of medical school is teaching you the knowledge, skills and decision making process that results in the patient (hopefully) getting better. With this sort of background, many MD’s tend to have research projects that focus on patient care and outcomes - finding better ways to treat disease or make hospitals safer.

On the other hand, if you’re more interested in finding out the minutia about a particular disease or the way a very particular aspect of the body responds in a very particular situation, or the mechanism of a particular drug then getting a PhD is more what you’re looking for.

To be sure, there’s a lot of overlap, and there are MD’s who perform more bench research than clinical, and there are a lot of PhD’s who work on clinical trials and to improve patient care.

Certainly MD/PhD programs offer another option.

I think the question you have to ask yourself is whether or not you need, on a personal level, the type of training an MD degree gives you to be satisfied. Medical school is difficult to get into, extremely expensive and will require you to complete a residency of 3-7 years after you graduate. If you’re not after the skills and the experiences it will give you, then it seems to me like a waste of time and money to go through with and graduate school will get you to your career goals that much sooner.