Specialty Spotlight: Internal Medicine
When you picture a career in medicine, you might think of a surgeon in the operating room, a pediatrician caring for children, or an emergency physician treating patients in the ER. But one of the largest and most diverse specialties in medicine is one that many students know much less about: Internal Medicine!
As an Internal Medicine physician, I care for adults with everything from common conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes to complex illnesses involving multiple organ systems at once.
What does an Internal Medicine doctor do?
One of the things that makes Internal Medicine unique is how many different career paths it can lead to.
Primary care: Some internists work in outpatient clinics, where they build long-term relationships with patients, provide preventive care, and manage chronic medical conditions.
Hospital medicine: Others work primarily in the hospital, caring for patients who are sick enough to require admission. A hospitalist might treat pneumonia, heart failure, kidney injury, serious infections, and many other conditions—all in the same day.
Subspecialty medicine: Internal Medicine is also the starting point for many specialties you may already recognize, including cardiology, gastroenterology, oncology, endocrinology, infectious disease, pulmonology, rheumatology, and nephrology.
Why I chose Internal Medicine
What drew me to Internal Medicine was the problem-solving. Patients don't always arrive with a diagnosis. They might come in because they're short of breath, unusually tired, experiencing chest pain, or have abnormal laboratory results. It's my job to gather the clues, develop a list of possible explanations, decide what testing is needed, and ultimately determine what is happening and how we can help. I find it fun to solve diagnostic puzzles and help patients figure out what is wrong with them / fix it!
I also love the breadth of the specialty. On any given day, I might need to think about the heart, lungs, kidneys, endocrine system, or all of them together.
Could Internal Medicine be right for you?
You certainly don't need to know your future specialty before medical school—in fact, medical school is designed to expose you to many different areas of medicine. But if you enjoy solving complex problems, learning about the entire human body, and having a career with many different paths available, Internal Medicine is one specialty worth exploring.
As you learn about careers in medicine, keep exploring specialties you haven't heard much about. You may discover that the part of medicine you eventually love is one you didn't even know existed.
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