Why specialization is key in medicine

I can no longer count how many times I've felt like a complete idiot for not knowing something during the course of this last year and a half in medical school. I got so conscious about my lack of knowledge that I started to observe my classmates - did they really know that much more than me?

Some of them most certainly do. I'm not going to lie. But a lot of them knew just as much or less than I did about certain things at a given moment. Phew! I'm not the class dunce!

But what I realized from all this neurotic behavior.. well sorta neurotic... is that we can't all know it all! There is just too much information!

I've had professors who say things like, "well we're not going to ask you to memorize this like they did in the old days. The only reason they memorized it back then is because that is all we knew about the body."

Now we know so much more! Its an information overload! Everywhere - not just Medicine.

I've heard about the con's of specialization - staying in your own realm of expertise may make someone myopic and seem less like a "real" doctor to some, but let me tell yah, its necessary!

With all the new things we're learning about disease, if something's up with my kidney I'd feel MUCH better going to a kidney specialist. I want someone who knows everything there is to know about the kidney, someone who loves the kidney so much they chose it as a career path, someone who has a picture of a kidney on their wall! Because an internal medicine doc has to know waaayy too much about the entire body to tell me everything there is to know about the kidney.

That's just the way it is. And thats fine by me!


I plan on going into neurology, with an emphasis on people who have numbness in their pinkie. I'll be the best pinkie specialist ever! (I kid of course.)