Pros and Cons of Emergency Medicine Review
Medicine

Pros and Cons of Emergency Medicine

Emergency medicine is a medical specialty that involves treating and diagnosing unforeseen injuries or unexpected emergency illnesses. It provides a rapid response to medical services. Emergency medicine physicians are more flexible and can be able to work in any department or shift their careers.

Just like any other career, working as an emergency medicine physician has its own drawbacks. Sometimes you must endure a lot of stress and pressure due to the nature of work. Let’s have a look at the different pros and cons of this.

Pros:

1. Time control: Although emergency medicine is a challenging career, you will have a lot of control over how often you work as well as when to work. You can decide to only work part-time hours or specific days. You can also take extended leaves from work.

2. Learning process: Each day there are new health problems with the patients. Therefore, they have to keep on learning new ways of handling the cases making emergency medicine more effective. It is also a learning process for physicians.

3. Greater opportunities: There are plenty of opportunities since the physician is trained in treating different ailments. Having knowledge of a wide number of emergency cases makes it easy for them to work in different departments. It also offers career flexibility where you can work in hospitals or change to working in an outpatient clinic.

4. Medical Versatility: Emergency Physicians can treat every kind of ailment. They are trained to treat patients with mild cases, answering medical calls to handling life-saving medical procedures. Therefore, emergency physicians have a wide choice and their day-to-day routine procedures are unpredictable.

5. Saving lives: Emergency physicians save a lot of lives as each day they meet many people in critical conditions and have to save them.

6. The physicians/specialist are trained to treat several ailments: I kind of said this earlier and it is great to know that these physicians/specialists are broad in a whole lot of ways to treat different illnesses at any given time. This shows how skilled and knowledgeable they are.

7. Career flexibility: Working as an emergency specialist or physician is great as you have nice flexibility. You can take a shift or go for a break to be replaced by another specialist. This also happens in daily work as you could work in the daytime and go rest in the night without being questioned.

8. There are new and unexpected ailments from each patient: As an emergency medicine specialist, you’re sure to encounter new issues from different patients, this makes the job fun. It’s fun because you will treat different illnesses, learn and broaden your knowledge the more.

9. Saving a life: This should be considered the best of benefits as it’s the utmost priority of every emergency physician. And of course, an emergency medicine specialist gets the chance to save lots of life in a day.

10. Part of crucial clinical research: These emergency specialists are so important to the nation and world and they are given the chance to get involved in crucial clinical research. This is awesome as not everyone can be in a lab with the best doctors or researchers in the world.

Cons:

1. Handling unpredictable emergency cases: Due to the high number of unpredictable cases each day, there is increased burnout. Though some days may be good, others may be worse.

2. Late working hours: Emergency medicine physicians normally work at night, during weekends, and even during public holidays. This makes them more isolated such that they don’t have time for themselves. Unless the physician comes up with a way to balance his work and social life, he might end up depressed or burnout from too much work.

3. Physicians not appreciated: Emergency Physicians are not recognized as real doctors and their hard work is not appreciated. They also don’t do private practice making it impossible for them to demand higher pay.

4. Heavy workloads: Emergency medicine physicians find themselves with a heavy workload and sometimes they have patients with challenging situations.

5. Constant movement: With this type of career, you have to constantly keep moving from one department to another. In addition, there is a lot of multitasking involved. Constant moving and multitasking can be very draining and sometimes you may feel overwhelmed.

6. Unpredictability: This is a job/career that is so much unpredictable and you know how it feels not being able to predict your next emergency call. This is worrisome as at the least expected time or hour, you could be called to the hospital.

7. Death trauma: This is one big disadvantage of an emergency medicine specialist as you would be exposed to a lot of death cases. This could give you death trauma as you would begin to think of the dead persons, which is terrible.

8. Stressful: No matter how strong or calm you are, you would certainly experience stress as an emergency physician. From the everyday movement to medical attention given to patients, you would be stressed out.

9. You can’t open a clinic: It’s almost impossible for an emergency physician to open his/her clinic unlike in other fields in medicine. This is bad as with their skills and knowledge, they’re only allowed to stay in the hospital to do their work.

10. Pay isn’t nice: Pay isn’t nice for emergency medical physicians when compared to other fields of medicine. This is still an issue or weird stuff yet unsolved. This low pay is bad and discourages a lot of people from going to this field of medicine.