Neurosurgeon FALLING OFF?????

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New low, even for this site

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Thread is useless and offensive. Must be deleted.

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(03-10-2021, 02:12 AM)Guest Wrote: Thread is useless and offensive. Must be deleted.

I think it’s pretty indicative of the type of people who propagate ‘discussion’ around here

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did something happen with one of the 7's at colorado?

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(03-12-2021, 12:47 PM)Guest Wrote: did something happen with one of the 7's at colorado?

why do you ask? both still listed on the site

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(03-09-2021, 05:27 PM)Guest Wrote: Let’s face it. Those that “can’t” end up in academics and teach. The private practice neurosurgeons are the best. They don’t need or want residents to do their jobs for them. Academic neurosurgery is full of frauds who hide in academics because they would never make it in private practice.

  
By and large, private practice is more clinical work as you don’t have residents to take care of mundane tasks. Many will hire APPs to help with this workload. The caveat is that if you are in private practice, you are often not staffing Level 1 trauma centers where the call burden is significant due trauma guideline requirements and the need to operate during non-daylight hours. The nice thing about private practice is that most of what you do, you are compensated for.  On the flip-side, if you are not busy you don’t get paid. There are bad private practice neurosurgeons too and if you work at a center that gets a lot of transfers, you will get the opportunity to clean up after them. Private practice neurosurgery is mostly bread and butter, you do ACDFs, decompressions, fusions, and maybe some simple brain tumor work. There are examples of people who go well beyond this, but for 80-90%, this is what you will do.


Academic neurosurgeons usually have expectations of publishing and performing “academic work.” This is often not well compensated in comparison to surgeries/procedures.  Additionally, they do tend to become skilled within a sub-speciality such as skull base, cerebrovascular or deformity.  These subspecialties require a village of people (ICU docs, ENT surgeons, neuro-oncologists, etc) to have a comprehensive program. By necessity, this usually requires an academic medical center but there are always outliers (non-academic medical centers that can offer all of this).

There are many very skilled people in academic neurosurgery that I would recommend a family member go see for a specific problem. While they may not publish a lot, they provide value by teaching you to operate and care for patients.  It is important to realize that there is value in people trying to do clinical and basic science and/or translational work as it helps to push the field forward. While some may not be as technically gifted, they help to push the field forward and ultimately help to improve our procedures and outcomes. The being said, there are many private practice neurosurgeons who are also not technically gifted.  

Of course, there are always examples of people who take advantage of the system and make residents do everything, but this is certainly not always the case and the blanket statement that was made is silly.

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(04-10-2020, 03:01 PM)Guest Wrote: Neurosurgery faculty here and very familiar with Eric Chang specifically. First off, I will not comment in detail on Chang's life path or choices, except to say 1) New England Baptist has an excellent spine surgeon who offered additional training that was of value. Don't dismiss a fellowship because you are unfamiliar with it or feel the place itself is beneath you. Would you dismiss a chance to work with Al-Mefty because he was in Arkansas or Van Loveren because he is in Tampa and neither is in the gilded halls of UCSF, Barrow, MGH, Hopkins? 2) Chang is not at Southern New Hampshire, but has moved on and made decisions that are best for him.

I do browse this forum to get a sense of what medical students and residents are thinking about these days. This post seems to deserve a response.

All of your years in college, medical school, residency, and fellowship are not perfectly predictive of your opportunities when you hit 33-38 years old and are finally done with training. Most of you are looking up, still waiting for the payoff when you can earn $800k+ and live happily ever after in private practice, or have a surgeon-scientist career with 3 R01's supporting 12 post-docs and 7 grad students. But what you THINK you want now may not be what you want at the end of it all, or maybe not what is on offer. Keep in mind neurosurgery is a small field. Maybe that plum private practice career isn't the lifestyle you want, or maybe the big academic departments aren't looking for a skull base surgeon with two first-author cell papers who is demanding a $1M lab startup package. You suck it up and find a way to be happy, because in the end you will have the opportunity to use your neurosurgery skills to help patients, and you will get paid at least a fair amount for it. Maybe after some time that ideal job comes along and you can shift in to it, or maybe what you settled on turns out to be pretty perfect.

No want wants to be reduced to an epitaph and have their personal choices judged by people who don't know them. Just work hard and make your own decisions about your own life.

These are the rare excellent posts that keep me coming here..

(03-09-2021, 05:27 PM)Guest Wrote: Let’s face it. Those that “can’t” end up in academics and teach. The private practice neurosurgeons are the best. They don’t need or want residents to do their jobs for them. Academic neurosurgery is full of frauds who hide in academics because they would never make it in private practice.

..and this is the garbage you've gotta sift through to find them.

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(04-03-2020, 02:13 AM)Guest Wrote: I was looking at MGH neurosurgery alumni and found this guy Eric Chang who was listed as an attending at Southern New Hampshire. This sounded like private practice so I did a bit of research and found out he went to MIT for undergrad → HMS for med school → MGH for neurosurg residency, which is pretty much perfect educational experience up until that point. Unfortunately after that he did a fellowship at New England Baptist Hospital (???), joined the faculty of UW (pretty good I guess) for a year, but then left for private practice. What makes people like this who seem set up for a career as an academic neurosurgeon leave for private practice?

This might be the funniest post I've ever read on here

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Honestly shocking how there is zero moderation on this website. We should just create a subreddit. It would be a much cleaner interface than the shitshow we see here.

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What's shocking is how rarely people report posts and how frequently complain about moderation. I delete a dozen porn site posts a day at least. People have repeatedly spoken against heavy moderation on neurosurgery forums. Otherwise we would all use SDN.