What's the most helpful/life changing medical specialty?

Depends on whether you treat patients one by one, or whether you are actually researching a cure.

Treating patients one by one is not helpful in the large scale of things.

>>8212894
>Treating patients one by one is not helpful in the large scale of things.
And yet it has to be done.

>>8212894
Not finding jackshit after billions of dollars isn't gonna be that helpful either

>>8212897
Many things have to be done. Mining has to be done. Why don't you become a miner?

If you want to create the biggest positive impact, certainly it is research, not treating patients.

>>8212909
Yea sure, we should all stop fixing roads and just focus on finding out how to build better roads.

>>8212909
>If you want to create the biggest positive impact, certainly it is research
Spoken like a true researcher.

>>8212917
>we should all
I thought it was a theoretical question on how to maximize helpfulness from the standpoint of one individual

>>8212894
I am somewhat biased as an MD-PhD, but I find that research and clinical work cannot be separated. Research without the clinical aspect is like shooting darts in the dark, the clinic is a compass pointing you in the right direction, a rope down from your ivory tower.
That's how I feet anyway, I've seen plenty of great researchers starting off in a great direction and eventually researching the most esoteric things, purely for intellectual pursuit/to publish more/to get grants.


>>8212892
As for your question, I feel all medical specialties are helpful and life changing both for the doctor and the patients. A plastic surgeon who saves burn victims isn't as helpful as an oncologist treating papillary carcinomas of the thyroid? An ENT specialist who treats a patient's vertigo or a an anesthesiologist treating chronic pain aren't as life-changing as surgeon removing a tumor?

I think it's stopping people from drinking soft drink and eating bullshit. Wait, is that a medical specialty?

>>8213059
I think medical research is mostly bullshit.

By that I mean that the vast majority of research isn't mechanism-based, it's based on statistics. This means that instead of trying to figure out what the hell's going on, we're instead just shooting in the dark. Many new discoveries are made, but we still don't have any clue why or how they work, so we're just making future research even more difficult for ourselves.

A cure for an ailment that works in 80 % of the population is completely useless for the remaining 20 % of said population. If we were to understand the mechanisms of how the cure and disease interacted, we'd most likely be able to help the remaining 20 %.

>>8213088
That hasn't been true for many years. Most research is mechanism-based today, and actually it's a lot more bullshit without EBM. We don't know 90-99% of the involved factors in interactions, as they rely on environment, other alternative interactions, etc. Our arrogance in believing we have a deep understanding of the mechanisms leads us to many failures, and as a mechanism-based researcher myself I can attest to that. Often what works in vitro doesn't work in vivo (most of the time actually), and what works in vivo in mice doesn't work in humans. But many of our failures lead to new discoveries. When we realize a gene isn't performing as expected from the in vitro work, and then find out it's inhibited by a miRNA we didn't know about, that's still a great discovery IMO.
Nevertheless, while basic research is obviously the future and present, it must be held to the strict standards of EBM.

>>8213100
>>8213088
Also regarding your last comment, hopefully more personalized medicine will be available in the future, but today it's still a dream in most fields.