
Samuel Shem’s classic medical satire “The House of God,” followed a cadre of burned-out internal medicine residents through their internship year. The average salary for a dermatologist is $438,000 (7 thhighest of all specialties), and the average salary for an anesthesiologist is 405,000 (11 th highest of all specialties). Major complications are rare in outpatient anesthesia, but if one is inducing general anesthesia, then unexpected complications of airway, breathing, or circulation (the ABCs) can occur.īoth dermatology and anesthesiology are high-paying specialties. Anesthesia residents are required to manage all forms of cases, including open-heart surgeries, neurosurgeries, trauma surgeries, Cesarean sections, and emergent chest or abdominal surgeries. Anesthesia will never be as safe or predictable as dermatology. Your friends who went to work straight out of college will be at least eight years ahead of you in the game of life, and may have already accumulated a mortgage and 1.93 children during the years you’ve been working as a resident physician and memorizing massive quantities of medical knowledge. A significant amount of deferred gratification is required for both specialties. For either specialty, if you graduate high school at age 18, you’ll be at least 30 years old when you finish training and are ready to begin your career. Both specialties require four years of college, four years of medical school, a one-year medical internship, and three years of residency training. The duration of training for an anesthesiologist and a dermatologist is identical. An anesthesiologist practicing 100% in an ambulatory surgery center should have zero emergency anesthetics, zero weekend duty, and zero night call. Ambulatory surgery patients are prescreened to eliminate those with medical problems such as morbid obesity, severe sleep apnea, or unstable cardiac, respiratory, or neurologic diagnoses. These procedures are low-risk surgeries which don’t disturb a patient’s physiology in any significant way. Outpatient surgeries include tonsillectomy, knee arthroscopy, shoulder arthroscopy, breast biopsy, hernia repair, rhinoplasty, hand surgery, foot surgery, nasal septoplasty, colonoscopy, and upper gastrointestinal endoscopy.

I n 2014 there were 11 million outpatient surgeries, which was 52% of the total number of surgeries. Most anesthetics in the United States are for ambulatory surgeries. Before you sign up for a lifetime as a dermatologist, consider the subspecialty of ambulatory anesthesiology.Īmbulatory anesthesiology is defined as the administration of anesthetics for outpatient surgical procedures, which are minor procedures which don’t require hospitalization. But one large subset of anesthesia work closely mimics the lifestyle of dermatology practice. A career in anesthesiology seems markedly different than a career in dermatology, because anesthesiologists frequently deal with acutely ill patients, middle of the night emergency surgeries, and complex anesthetics for open heart, brain, or neonatal surgeries. Hypertension, heart problems, obesity, and sleep apnea are problems for the patient’s internal medicine doctor, not for the dermatologist.


If a patient has multiple medical comorbidities such as hypertension, heart problems, obesity, or sleep apnea, these issues are usually unrelated to the dermatology consultation. Dermatology clinic is known for short visits and long lists of patients. Dermatologists have important roles treating common problems such as chronic acne or diagnosing life-threatening melanomas. Dermatologists perform procedures with their hands, including biopsies or the resection of lesions. Dermatologists can take weeks off work without losing their entire practice.

Dermatology was also ranked as the number-one specialty in terms of work-lifestyle balance. Dermatology is a high-paying medical specialty with almost no emergencies, weekend duties, or night call. In a ranking of the most competitive medical specialties, dermatology ranked second, trailing only plastic surgery. Dermatology is consistently one of the most competitive residencies for graduating medical students. Dermatology and anesthesiology are two medical specialties which offer lifestyle balance.
