Have you considered entering the medical field, but haven’t quite found your niche yet? Are you passionate about issues of women’s health, and want to be part of making sure women can get the care they want and need? Do you love children, and does the thought of being part of bringing more into the world give you the warm fuzzies? You might want to consider becoming an OBGYN.
Undecided? Let’s talk briefly about some of the benefits of entering this particular corner of the medical world, so you can see if an OBGYN career might be right for you.
1. Ability to Provide Generalized Care
One of the things OBGYN’s usually love about their specialization is that there’s a lot of flexibility to the services they can provide: they can focus on several branches of medicine centering around the female reproductive system, or they can also function as a primary care doctor in their own right. Given the intimate nature of what OBGYN’s usually take care of, some women prefer to see OBGYN’s for their general healthcare needs as well as needs that deal with their specialization. If you should choose, as an OBGYN, to provide basic healthcare services as well as your regular services, every day will likely be different with fresh new challenges.
2. Variety of High-Skill Specialties
Women come to OBGYN’s for a variety of potential issues, which leaves aspiring OBGYN’s lots of room to choose what their specialty might be. You could choose to focus on:
- Issues of fertility, or reproductive endocrinology. These OBGYN’s deal with issues revolving around fertility and perform services such as in-vitro fertilization, intrafallopian transfers, and fetus transfers.
- Female pelvic medicine. These OBGYN’s focus specifically on curing infections of the female urinary tract and the study of the pelvic floor. They can treat issues like bladder pain, prolapses of pelvic organs, or any kind of pelvic infection.
- Maternal medicine. These are the OBGYN’s who focus on high-risk pregnancies and help people give birth who have conditions that might affect the process.
- Gynecologic Oncology. Gynecologic Oncologists focus on treating cancer in the female reproductive system.
3. OBGYN And Patient Familiarity
Many women who see OBGYN’s see the same one for all of their issues; it is possible, even probable, that you will get to work with the same patients, socialize with them, and follow their stories as they go from puberty to menopause. This can be a very friendly, if not always comfortable, environment to work in, and a practitioner with the proper disposition might find that the connections they make with their patients might help them as they walk through life together.
4. Ability to Make A Difference
A lot of the people who choose to become OBGYN’s choose that path because they get to have a direct impact on issues that they care about, such as birth control and women’s rights. Being part of the way that women can get access to the care they need can be an attractive signing bonus for aspiring OBGYN’s, as well as the difference you directly get to make in patients’ lives. Delivering their children, listening to their problems, and being with them through a variety of potential health issues means they have a more direct impact on their patients’ lives than most.
5. Prevalence of Job Openings
If you’re reading this and you’ve only recently been thinking about entering the medical field, an OBGYN position might be a good one to shoot for. While there’s no shortage of available posts in the medical field at the moment, there’s a large number of OBGYN positions open across the country. Women’s health is not a field that will go out of style or become unnecessary; you’d be hard-pressed to find a more stable career choice.
Making a Difference One Patient at a Time
If any of the above sounds good to you, you might want to consider becoming an OBGYN. OBGYN’s get to have ongoing relationships with their patients, practice generalized medicine, work in high-skilled specialty areas, and are essentially the perfect marriage of surgery and generalized treatment. If you’re a medical student seeking a specialization or someone from another career path seeking something different, look into becoming an OBGYN. This particular medical field might be made just for you.
