When it comes to medical specialties, there is often a lot of pride involved. But the fact that your specialty is considered competitive or not does not make you a good or bad doctor. It simply says which specialties are the hardest to get into. Knowing which specialties are more difficult to enter can be very useful information for medical and pre-med students. All specialties are competitive, and if your specialty is ranked lower than you would like, it's not a judgment at all, it's simply what the data says.
According to our comprehensive analysis, Plastic Surgery came in first place with a total of 120 points, followed closely by Dermatology in second place with 116 points.
Neurosurgery
ranked third with 114 points, followed by Orthopedic Surgery in fourth place with 104 points and ENT in fifth place with 114 points. Plastic surgeons focus on soft tissues such as skin, muscle and fat, rather than bones, which are found on the territory of orthopedic surgeons. The word plastic comes from the Greek word “plastikos”, which means “to mold”, which is a reference to how plastic surgery reshapes and manipulates tissues. If you are precise, meticulous and have an obsession for detail, plastic surgery may be a good choice for you.Plastic surgery is an innovative field in which you will experience a wide variety. The pay is more variable than other specialties, but you'll still have a pretty good lifestyle since the compensation is above average. Dermatologists manage skin, hair and nail diseases both medically and procedurally. A dermatologist can identify and treat more than 3000 conditions such as eczema, psoriasis and skin cancer. Neurosurgery deals with CNS (Central Nervous System) and PNS (Peripheral Nervous System) surgeries.
Neurosurgeons can touch, change and augment the central nervous system in real time. Neurosurgery is one of the few specialties that can really save people's lives. Although it can be an exciting race, at one point you may be called to the hospital to save someone's life. It is a fascinating specialty that satisfies the intellectually curious but it has one of the most challenging lifestyles of any specialty. ENT (Otorhinolaryngology) includes vocal cords and larynx, nose and sinuses, ears and endocrinology including thyroid and parathyroid as well as head and neck cancers.
Orthopedic surgery focuses on the musculoskeletal system which includes fractures and broken bones. Surgeries also involve tendons, ligaments and nerve or vascular injuries. There is a notable satisfaction in being an orthopedic surgeon since orthopedics usually has good results. Most patients experience substantial improvement in their condition after. Like many surgical specialties, orthopedic surgery can have tough hours but the downside is that orthopedic surgeons are consistently the best-compensated doctors number 1 or number 2.If a specialty has a low match rate then it needs to be more competitive right? Not exactly.
I recently saw an analysis of someone who only relied on match rates and in doing so suggested that general surgery and psychiatry were the third most competitive specialties. Anyone who is in medical school or residency will tell you that's certainly not the case. AOA (Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society) is an honor society in medicine. What you need to know for the purposes of this analysis is that being an AOA is a good indicator of being a high-achieving student. Obviously it's not perfect since some schools don't have it. The top 40 NIH-funded medical schools tend to be more competitive meaning that students who entered these schools were on average stronger students.
I'm not surprised by these results and it's a good sign. ROAD stands for Radiology, Ophthalmology, Anesthesiology and Dermatology. An interesting pattern that I noticed was that the top 5 were highly paid specialties: Neurosurgery and Orthopedic Surgery are almost always the 2 highest-paying specialties.
