Is there a job that mixes psychology with medicine?

Hi Rama,
It depends on exactly what your interests are when it comes to the medicine side of this question. There are many ways you can go into the medical field, either by being a researcher, a doctor or nurse, a pharmaceutical sales representative, or any number of other medical professions. However, I do have two specific ideas in mind from how you asked your question.

Psychiatrist: Psychiatrists attend medical school and are trained in the mechanics of how we understand the brain to work from a biochemical perspective. This means studying how depression can be caused by reduced serotonin receptor activity in patients, or the use of benzodiazepines to treat anxiety. In practice, the difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist is that psychiatrists are licensed to write prescriptions. Whereas psychologists generally work with patients through talk therapy and 'softer' medical interventions, psychiatrists work with patients to help them balance their neurochemistry so they can function more fully and happily. They also need to make the distinction between patients that need pharmaceutical interventions and those that do not, which is often the hardest judgment to make.

Neurosurgeon: As you can probably tell from the name, this is a person that performs surgery on a patient's brain. This ties in less with psychology, but a strong understanding of how the brain works is still necessary as you do not want to cause any unnecessary damage to this most important organ! Neurosurgeons help to remove brain tumors, remove something after an accident, and many other things.

I highly recommend doing a little research on these two professions. They both require many years of schooling and a strong dedication to reaching your goals. If you believe you have that drive, they will also likely be very rewarding professions as you could end up helping hundreds (thousands even!) of patients over the course of your career.

Hi Rama - A psychiatrist (not a psychologist) is a person who practices psychology in many different ways but also is a physician. Many psychiatrists work as counselors but others are also very involved in medical practice and research.

Another job that is pretty interesting is psychopharmachology. Big scary way of saying that they study the way medicine interacts with the brain function. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopharmacology
http://www.onetonline.org/find/quick?s=psychopharmacology

I considered several careers along these lines but I was an older student and was not interested in going to medical school. It's a very challenging area to study but is also full of great opportunities.

Good Luck!

Hello Rama,
Can I suggest if you want an exciting job a forensic psychologist for criminal profiling I would like that too? That would be a very exciting job and you would stay busy doing forensic medicine along with profiling criminals at a crime scene investigation. That would be a medical examiner or other options with medicine and crime are used quite often in labs too. You would be trying to solve scenarios of a crime scene looking at samples and so on. Good luck thought I would suggest that since you said exciting. If you use your browser to search medicine and crime you will get a whole host of articles in search results for both. The very best to you in your search you will do fine. Good luck.