What is work like as an Infectious Disease Specialist in a hospital setting?
This is the profession I want to enter and I wanted to know what to expect when entering the profession. #medicine #doctor #healthcare #hospital-and-healthcare
2 answers
Stephen’s Answer
Another great site is the American Medical Association: https://www.ama-assn.org/specialty/infectious-diseases
Stephen recommends the following next steps:
Kim’s Answer
Nikki.
Answering this from a patient's perspective:
My elderly Dad had recurrent MRSA infections over a 3 year period. He was admitted I don't know how many times! Our hospital ID doctors also followed up with us outside the hospital. We have now been through three different ID doctors, and finally have one who we like. The first one was not being aggressive enough in getting to the root cause of the problem. The second one is semi-retired.
From what I saw, ID doctors have to interact a lot with the other doctors. My Dad's problems started with UTIs (urinary tract infections) and so we had a urologist. Then when they were looking for the source, they wanted to look at his heart, as he had recently gotten stents. So we had a cardiologist. It was difficult for us, because the doctors had conflicting opinions and WE ultimately had to decide whether to do a heart procedure. We said no.Then the hospitalist (primary care doctor) accidentally found the "colony" in his artificial hip socket, so then we had orthopedics. Oh, and then there was the time he started to go into kidney failure, so we had a kidney specialist. The doctors have to know what tests to run, and, more importantly, how to interpret the results.
Doctors also have to be able to deal with the families. My Dad is lucky, in that we have been problem-free for a year! But not everyone with infectious diseases will survive. You will learn over the course of your training to somehow be both compassionate and yet "emotionally detached."
There are few ID doctors. I think it is great that you are interested in this field, and wish you the best!
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