Gastroenterologist They'll Give You a Gut Check

Gastroenterologist: a physician who diagnoses and treats diseases and disorders of the digestive system:

the esophagus
stomach
gall bladder and biliary tract
liver
pancreas
small and large intestines.

Specializing in gastroenterology means you will perform a lot of procedures such as fiber-optic peroral endoscopy and colonscopy.

Quick Facts

Competitiveness: High

Length of training: 5 years

Number of residency programs: 245

Number of residents in training: 1,000

Number in U.S. currently Board Certified in specialty: 10,000

First year mean compensation: $180,000

Mean number of hours per week in patient care activities: 56.7

Residency Information

You will complete a 3 year residency in internal medicine followed by a 2 year fellowship in gastroenterology.

Why Choose

Most likely you will choose this field during your residency after being positively influenced by a physician whom you trained under. Many say cardiology would be their second choice career, but say there are too many cardiologists. Essentially, these specialists enjoy the mix between mechanical activities and the intellectual challenges in their field.

Typical Schedule

You will be working 10 to 12 hour days and half of each day is spent in the hospital, consulting on patients and performing procedures. Your patient population will be middle-aged or older and suffer from irritable bowel syndrome.

If you only practice your specialty and do not provide primary care you will rarely have after-hours calls. In this specialty keeping pace with emerging techniques and new knowledge is necessary because the field is constantly evolving.

If You're Interested

You will want to be a physician first because your diagnosis most often will come through the history and secondly from the physical examination. Overall, you will want to be a total physician who understands the relationship of the various organ systems and how they might influence illness in your patients.