Okay but why not both...someone can become a good surgeon anywhere but good research doesn’t exist everywhere. Your average MW graduating resident might have better operative skill at graduation, but I’d imagine that gap closes quickly during fellowship and attendinghood. Meanwhile, the guy from JH is way ahead in research, and it’s not like the guy from MW can decide all of a sudden that he wants to be a great researcher because he has a busy practice.
Long game
Research, like a bunch of PhDs do lab work and the resident gets tacked on? Or the repeat meta-analyses or salami science plaguing our journals?
Yes on average JHU and similar places have excellent resources for research, and it’s truly a loss for the field when their residents don’t utilize them. Future neurosurgeon-scientists have come from all over the program academic spectrum, and quality ones have had to find ways for research to work without being able to hire extra lab hands or establish a medical student mill.
At the end, the NIH and similar stakeholders separate the scientists from the wannabes.
Me not matching at JHU had much more to do with ranking them last than luck. Maybe things are different now but 7 years ago they were malignant to the max.
Although doing 2 years of research on the expense of more operative experience works fine for your program and lifts its reputation with more publications, it might truly mess up your career to certain extent.
The national average of cases by time of graduation from neurosurgery is 1400 cases. If we assume the average case takes 4 hours, that is about 5600 hours of operating. If those are interrupted by 2 years of protected research, you might retain 60% of the skills from the cases you've done before the research years. But let's say 5000 hours total of neurosurgery.
The resident who graduate with 2000 cases and less research time will have 3000 hours extra of operative skills at time of graduation compared to you.
As a new faculty, if you do 200 cases per year (stretching it), that is 800 hours. So the that resident will have at least 3 years head start with operative skills!
Based on the 10,000 hours rule by Malcom Gladwell, those protected research years and "superior" personality didn't really work in your best interest.