Climbing and Medical School/Working as a Physician.

Hello everyone. I have been accepted to Osteopathic medical school in Parker, CO. Needless to say, I am VERY EXCITED!!! I was reading the previous forum entitled "Climbers in/out of Medical School", and wanted to build on that.
mountainproject.com/v/climb…
That was a great thread, lots of different opinions and thoughts. I would like to hear more input from folks, especially any physicians out there. What are some tips on finding balance between school, family (I have a wife and kid), and climbing. What are some of the best specialties to get into as a climber? I'm most interested in emergency medicine and family practice. Any docs practicing in these settings want to let me know how it really is (as an EM doc, do you really have lots of time off, good hours, etc? As a FP doc, are you really on call all the time, working 12 hour days 5 days/week, etc?) What do you wish you knew going into it and what would you have done differently? Are you getting to enjoy life as a healer and having some fun with family and in the mountains? Are you satisfied with life as a doctor in your specialty and happy that you took that path? Since my list of questions is endless, I'll stop there, so if anyone wants to reply and spout away about how it is, that would be great! Thanks!

Can't speak to working, but I'm done with three years of med school (doing an MPH in between 3/4) and was able to climb often up until 3rd year, when my soul was chained up in the hospital basement. I took up aid climbing because I didn't have much time to work on my free technique.

If it is lifestyle you are after then emergency medicine is the choice. It is shift work and affords a lot of time off with good pay. Being in family medicine will be way more work for far less money. Yes I enjoy medicine, I'm a general surgeon, but no I don't like the ever increasing hassles/regulations that go along with it. Good luck. Enjoy the comraderie that it takes to get through it.

My wife is an ER doc. She loves her job. Interesting medical cases, great pay, awesome hours, and she gets to work with kids (she is a pediatric emergency physician).

She works 12 8-hour shifts per month (realistically, they are 9- or 10-hour shifts after paperwork). The national average is probably more like 15 shifts per month.

The downside is that it is shift work with lots of nights and weekends.

The upside is the 10-day block of vacation each month and no on-call.

As an outside observer, I would add that to consider ER work you should be strong at both problem solving and multi-tasking. Most cases you treat will be at least somewhat different than anything you have seen before, and you will have 10 of those different cases in different rooms at the same time.

Great to see other climber docs and docs to be!

I would say that through med school and residency, your schedule will be characterized by extremes - either all work or nothing to do at all.

You will get hammered with course and clinical work. During these times, try to tread water with your climbing skills and strength. If you can sneak in a workout or two a week just to keep the muscles alive and skills from dulling, that would be a reasonable goal. Learn to love the climbing gym as a temporary compromise to the larger goal of becoming a doc and climbing more in the future.

Then there are the times when you are on vacation or have an easy rotation. This is when you can climb like mad and work on projects - basically live the dream. The difficult part here is finding a partner with a schedule to match.

As for picking a specialty, I would say there generally two groups of specialties that meld well with a climbers' lifestyle. One is the "9-5" job where you can predictably climb after work and on weekends. These include jobs that do not have too many in-patient responsibilities (family med, radiology, derm). Then there are shift style jobs where you work like hell for a couple of days and then get several days off in a row (ER, hospitalist, etc). Specialties that focus on in-patient services can be frustrating for climbers (any surgical specialty, interventional cards, etc).

Good luck and climb on doc!

Dr. Dan

Great to read some of these comments, thank you all for posting. Bobby, your wife's job sounds incredible and absolutely ideal. I came across a 2009 study from UC Davis that looks at career satisfaction by specialty, and pediatric EM ranked number 1 (neurosurgery was last). Here's the original paper if anyone's interested.
biomedcentral.com/1472-6963…
Here's their table for happiness by specialty.
biomedcentral.com/1472-6963…
EM has been my number 1 choice for awhile now, especially after my EMT clinicals where I got to see how interesting of a job it is with all the different medical and trauma patients to be treated. And it seems that the schedule can't be beat! I am attracted to family practice also though, as I think it would be nice to develop more long-term relationships with patients. Daniel C, you mention that it's a 9-5, which would be great, but I hear about a lot of FP docs working way more than that every day! As jwrags says, more work for less money isn't that appealing. It's too bad because I am very interested in FP and I believe that primary care is a critical piece of the healthcare system that needs to be expanded. The money part doesn't bother me so much even though I'll have almost 300k in debt to pay off. Job satisfaction is definitely more important to me than money, and FP docs still do pretty damn well, but realistically I think I would be unhappy being completely overworked and not getting to spend enough time with my family and climb once in awhile. Scott, I hope your fourth year is better than the third!I was also wondering how many hours/week you docs worked during your residencies. Is it really as brutal as its sounds? Keep the comments coming!

kubes wrote: EM has been my number 1 choice for awhile now, especially after my EMT clinicals where I got to see how interesting of a job it is with all the different medical and trauma patients to be treated.

Forgot to mention... I would have had more time for climbing, but I work for a volunteer EMS and rescue squad. I dropped EMS and did only rescue during third year, but I'm back at EMS again as well.

Interesting thread. My 2 cents as an EDMD whose climbing career ( 40 years ) has outlsted my professional one.
I changed from private practice to EM after 5 years to deliberately have more time for climbing. I could average 2-3 days per week and several week long plus trips a year. Yes the EM schedule is very flexible but the nights take their toll as one ages and family commitments, especially with younger kids compete mightily. If you are dedicated to your career, hospitla/department priorities will also tke some time as well.
Some random observations.
Have a VERY understanding spouse if they don't climb.
The body gives out long before the desire.
Geography is important - access to lots of climbing ( I live north of Boulder ). However , EM jobs in popular climbing venues are very competitive.
Lastly, as other folks have said - choose a specialty that you love and the rest will take care of itself.While climing has been my passionate avocation, the real rewards have come from patient care
Good luck!

Well said Bert.

Two comments about the physician job satisfaction list. First, most doctors seem to find a great deal of satisfaction in their jobs. The physicians in the specialties listed as being the least satisfied are probably more satisfied in their work than are most non-physicians. Second, the personality type that leads to specialty choice may be the actual determinant of job satisfaction. In other words, people that choose to be pediatricians would probably be happy no matter what they did.
So as one of the writers above noted, you should choose your specialty based on what interests you rather than the time it affords you to climb. In most cases, once you are middle aged, your job won't keep you from climbing. Your wife and kids will. It is no longer to possible to be married and be a satisfied climber. There is only one woman in the world who will put up with a three day a week climber, but Bert is already married to her.
Overall, the best strategy for climbing is to not become a doctor, but instead, to marry one. Not only will you have time to climb, but you will have the time and resources to maintain a mistress on the side. Your satisfaction rating will be at least triple that of a pediatric ER doctor.
Having children is a bad choice for climbing satisfaction, and it is a mistake that needs to be avoided. I know that a lot of people will object, and claim a special satisfaction in climbing with a child. This does occur, but it only lasts for a two week window around age 9, when the upward trajectory of your child's climbing skill intersects with your plummeting capabilities. Satisfaction then declines. For example, after my 18 year old daughter belayed my onsite of Fantasia at Vedauwoo, instead of congratulating me she told me that I "looked gripped with fear." It gets even worse than that, but it is a long story.

Congratulations on your medical school acceptance! Medical school and residency (no matter what your specialty) will likely put a damper on your climbing, especially if you are balancing your limited free time with family (hopefully your wife is a climber).
I was able to climb 2-3 nights a week in the gym and at a least 2 weekends a month outside during medical school. I did my residency in family medicine in Grand Junction so I would be close to Rifle and Unaweep. Now I work in a rural hospital in southern CO just doing ER work. I work 2 24h shifts a week and get 5 days off to climb. Finishing med school and residency was the best thing to happen to my climbing!
Having worked both ER and family practice, I can tell you there are definately positives and negatives about both in terms of lifestyle. There are plenty of 9-5 4d work week no nights/holiday or weekend family practice jobs that pay reasonably and provide an excellent lifestyle.
The best advice I can give you is don't base your specialty decision on climbing. Choose which ever field of medicine you are most passionate about as you will be doing it a lot longer than you will be climbing.

DUDE!!! Super excited for you. Glad you got the acceptance. I dont have much personal experience to share as a medical doctor or DO but I know you will excel in your program and as a physician. I love emergency medicine as an EMT. Congrats again!! Now lets go climb.

Congratulations!
As others have mentioned, ER is a classic choice for climbing physicians (and osteopaths) because of the long stretches of free time it affords.
It can be tough, however, to often have to deal with people having the worst day of their lives.
As an ophthalmologist in private practice, I couldn't be happier with my career choice. I take most Fridays off to climb. This works well because it doesn't interfere with spending time with my kids (they're in school). I usually work less than 40 hours a week and love helping people to see.
I didn't climb much from when I was a third year medical student until I finished my residency. I could have been more aggressive about fitting it in, but it seemed like the natural thing to do to focus on something else for a while.
Some surgeons worry a lot about their fingers, but it hasn't been an issue for me. I think that having strong fingers gives me a steadier hand.
Keep an open mind and try to enjoy the process of becoming a doctor. It's a very rich experience.

I'm an ER resident now, currently in year 3 of 4, and I'm completely satisfied with my career and choice of specialties. I climbed a ton during medical school...most weekends, plus longer trips during the summers and between rotations. I also did a PhD, though, so those years were the most productive as far as climbing goes. I climb a lot now too, although it varies from month to month as others have said. But it's pretty rare that I go more than 2 weeks without climbing ouside somewhere, and I can always get to the gym.

It helps that I have a wife who loves climbing and who is available whenever I'm not working. Add a spouse who works a 9-5 job and other family obligations and there might not be that much time left for climbing during residency. I can literally go climbing anytime that I'm not working.

After residency, there are all kinds of jobs available. I have a friend who's an ER doc who only works days, 4 on and then 6 off. There are half-time gigs too where you only work 7 or so shifts a month. It's a very flexible specialty, as you and others have already alluded.

Finally, I don't buy the argument that you should just choose whatever specialty interests you the most. You need to look at the bigger picture. I find hand surgery very interesting, but there is no way that I would have been happy in a surgical residency or with the compromises in other aspects of life that come with being a surgeon.

Kubes, congrats on getting in! I am a 4th year DO student at AZCOM and am just finishing up my audition rotations for a residency in emergency med. In my experience, med school was great for my growth as a climber. I climbed harder than I ever did in college. All the frustration of studying, exams, board exams, and rotations I took out on the cliffs. The keys were finding a classmate who also enjoyed climbing and going to school in an area with climbing in any direction. Because we had the same schedule, we were able to get out more. Even if it takes having to train someone new to the sport on how to belay properly, it will get you outside. Take the time to train people and you will have plenty of partners with your exact same schedule.

You also need to make time for climbing. I take it climbing is something makes you happy. The happier you are as a med student, the better you will focus and study. The better you focus, the better your scores will be, etc...

Keep your mind open as you go through your third year rotations. You never know when you will stumble across your calling. As appealing as shift work is, you still have to work nights and sleep during prime climbing hours. You still have to work weekends, and sometimes it is hard to find partners for those weekdays you have off. However, emergency medicine is da bomb!

Good luck with school. This is a great opportunity to learn and do as much as you can without any of the responsibility as a resident or attending.

Just to clarify: There are plenty of jobs in EM that don't require you to work any nights or weekends. Kaiser is a good example. There's typically a ~25% higher salary for night and weekend shifts, so the people who don't mind working nights/weekends do so and make more money. The people who don't want to don't have to, but make less money.

Thanks everyone for the informative and insightful replies. It's great reading about other climbers' experiences and thoughts within the medical field, and reassuring to know that many of you are enjoying a fulfilling career in medicine and still getting out to climb. For some of you that replied earlier on, please note that I changed my original post slightly to ask some better questions. I would like to hear what you wish you knew at the beginning of your medical journey and what, if anything, you would have done differently. Any more thoughts, advice, insights, or random stories from the medical professionals out there are very much appreciated.

So I'll keep it short, but I am a first year at RVU and climb 3-4 days a week, mostly at the gym. I do get up to eldo every once in a while. Time management is key. It might sound a bit OCD, but I have to account for every minute of my day. I too am married and have 2 kids. Climbing is important, my wife knows it, and so we make it work. Good luck, and if you have questions about the school or anything else shoot me a pm. Congrats.