Medical specialty that deals with venoms

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Nope222

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Hi, I'm curious what type of doctor takes care of you when you've gotten stung/bitten by some venomous snake/spider/fish/jellyfish etc? I'm pretty interested in that kind of thing therefore I'm wondering what specialty I should take in the future.

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Hi, I'm curious what type of doctor takes care of you when you've gotten stung/bitten by some venomous snake/spider/fish/jellyfish etc? I'm pretty interested in that kind of thing therefore I'm wondering what specialty I should take in the future.
Toxicology
 
It's tox, but usually that's merely on the phone as a consultant/poison control, with the legwork being done by general inpatient services or the ICU as needed. Geography matters immensely though. Living in Arkansas or Arizona where there's a lot of venomous snakes will give you more opportunities to deal with venom than Chicago or San Francisco. You're still going to be fielding a lot more calls dealing with other poisons regardless.

It's possible that Wilderness/Austere Medicine (a fellowship out of Emergency Med) would provide some specialized knowledge related to envenomations.
 
Great thing about medicine is you can do as much as your motivation allows. Tox is the obvious choice, but any generalist like emergency or family medicine will be dealing with this as well. If you do end up in toxicology the vast majority of your cases will be: baby got into something, somebody tried to OD on purpose, somebody ODed accidentally either because they're old or because they were trying to get high. Trying to make a practice 100% out of envenomation is impractical and you would be better off studying that specifically in undergrad/grad school and going the phd route, but if you want to be a doc and envenomation is interesting to you, do the legwork to find out as much as you can about it, become the expert, give talks and such, and the work will generally find you.
 
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