2 Responses to “I dont understand!?”

1. belfus Says:
   January 19th, 2011 at 6:33 am

   intern is the first year of your training after you get your M.D.
   then comes residency- the length varies depending on your specialty
   after residency you’re a staff physician. other places have different names for this, like perhaps "attending physician" but the essential idea is that you’re on your own. you can practice unsupervised.
   sometimes people do a fellowship after residency if they want to sub-specialize. for instance, doing a plastic surgery fellowship after finishing a general surgery residency.

2. W W D Says:
   January 19th, 2011 at 6:33 am

   If you hang around a medical school/teaching hospital, you’ll see medical students in their pre-clinical time who are basically just doing classwork and labs, and more advanced students (in some institutions known as externs) who are actually in contact with patients on clinical rotations. You’ll usually recognize them by the short lab coats on their backs and the glazed look in their eyes.
   Once graduated, doctors go on to their residencies in their chosen specialties. The PGY-1 residents are still informally called interns, and different specialties require from 3 to 5 years of residency. Once done, most doctors move on to private practice, but a good number go into fellowships, usually a couple of years, in a subspecialty. Also, somebody has to teach all these doctors in training, and the academic staff are generally referred to as attending physicians. They may be in a strict structure with the same heirarchy as you see on a college campus (instructor, assistant professor, etc.) and may or may not have both the academic post and a private practice.
   This, of course, is the US model. UK has a completely different system.

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