Why are obgyn residents the worst?

[jhamaican]

worst field in medicine. Is it any wonder they hate their lives...

Honestly, if I was offered OB/GYN or quit medicine it would be an easy decision...

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[jhamaican]

Also, all round, the residents and attending talk a huge amount of smack about IM and say that they're basically doing their job and operating on top of it which pisses me off. I just don't get it.

Is that why they call IM about managing basic diabetes?

 

[Epilepsy365]

This field is dominated by gunning cats who failed to gun properly on the USMLE during medical school

There are some cool dudes in this specialty but they are very few overall. In fact, I was very blessed to have this rotation with one of those dudes where all he does is GYN surgeries. LOL. The OB part is very overrated.

 

[seeinghowitgoes]

2017, nothing like a lovely aged thread.

They’re great at my institution - love when we have a rotator on our services. Bad apples in every specialty, best not to generalize.

 

[order66.exe]

2017, nothing like a lovely aged thread.

They’re great at my institution - love when we have a rotator on our services. Bad apples in every specialty, best not to generalize.

I think the average specialty has a 85:15 good: bad ratio. For Ob/gyn its more like 60:40.

I had some great residents on my OB/Gyn and some of the best people I worked with in third year. But the bad residents were really bad and OB/Gyn had the highest proportion of them compared to every other service.

 

[ScreamingInternally]

Is that why they call IM about managing basic diabetes?

Haha, when I was on cards consult we had to go to L&D for a sinus tach while the woman was in labor. The fellow just looked at the OB resident like "are you serious right now??"

 

[Mass Effect]

I AGREE. OB/GYN residents are incompetent teachers. I've seen them be very unprofessional and talk about patients vaginas smelling and violate HIPPA. They treat us med students like we are stupid when we know more than them. They are very inconsistent in their preferences and emotionally labile. I did my rotation at the DMC in detroit and the majority of the residents are from out of state or canada. They gossip constantly and will talk bad about each other as soon as someone has their back turned. Very different experience than my other rotations.

I doubt an MS3 knows more about OB/Gyn than an OB/Gyn resident and that's the point. How are you using emotionally labile?

To add to the thread, I had a malignant OB attending as an MS3 who had no business teaching med students. Not only was a jerk, but he also had no boundaries and often spoke about his private life, ex-wife, and dates. He got into hot water with another school when he started partying with a med student from that school and was photographed drunk and all over her at a bar one night while she was on his service.

 

[Dr G Oogle]

Haha, when I was on cards consult we had to go to L&D for a sinus tach while the woman was in labor. The fellow just looked at the OB resident like "are you serious right now??"

I mean it’s not the same as cardiology consulting OBGyn for a menorrhagia in a premenopausal woman on her period while she’s on a heparin drip for a saddle embolism and is intubated, but you know you do you...there are crappy residents and docs in every specialty from ortho bros to nsgy jerks to passive aggressive obgyns but unless you’re perfect, I wouldn’t generalize. I spend a lot of time with students and can pretty much tell who’s going to have a bad experience and who will have a good one from day one. Often that perceived passive aggressiveness is in response to an utter lack of interest on the students part, and yea I get there are some really crummy residents who are terrible teachers, but a genuinely interested student is not going to have a terrible experience. But I student that comes in with an attitude of “I don’t need to know this, I’m going into ortho, cards, neurosurgery” and then spends the day looking bored is going to irritate even the most patient teacher not to mention the ones who have a baseline short fuse and are already stressed out, often these are the students who complain in the vein of these overly emotive posts about how terrible
OBgyn residents which really smacks of entitlement and, honestly, a tad of misogyny.

 

[ScreamingInternally]

Residents are humans, some are bad and some are good. I had an extremely negative time on my OB/Gyn rotation despite working my tail off and expressing interest in the field from day one. I got involved as a witness in a lawsuit due to how terrible one male attending treated his patients and the sexually suggestive comments he made during Gyn exams (which I reported him for and was ignored), I had two residents who would constantly bicker and try to put me and the other medical student in the middle of their arguments to take sides, I had a tech slap my hand repeatedly for doing what the attending asked during c-sections because the tech was too busy having side conversations to do her job, one resident even left her post on two separate occasions after being distinctly told NOT TO LEAVE by the chiefs to 1) get a mole removed from her face in the middle of a work day and 2) travel to Vegas for her bachelorette party which then resulted in one of the chiefs having to drive 2+ hours for a robot case which then was done without a second person certified to assist with the robot (illegal in the state they were practicing in), I was turned away from most patient rooms because of being male/med student (which is understandable but still sucks) and saw the same for male residents and attendings. But yeah, I’m probably just entitled to expect more than that from physicians. And I’m definitely a misogynist for standing up for my female patients after essentially being sexually assaulted by a male attending.

I realize that not all OBs are bad, I had some that were genuinely awesome, but I would still generalize that many OB Gyn residencies are very toxic, after experiencing several such programs first hand and being told similar stories from several more. Even my close friend going into OB/Gyn has hated nearly every rotation/interview because of how toxic the people are, but she loves what the training will lead to so she has to suffer through it.

Also, to say that you can tell which med students are going to have a good/bad time on the rotation based on how you perceive them in the first day or so is just as subjective and as much of a generalization as anything else that’s been said here tbh, and shows that you are prejudging them, thereby increasing the odds of having said outcome.

 

[NickNaylor]

I really enjoyed the clinical aspects of my OB/GYN rotation in medical school but found residents, faculty, and staff so incredibly difficult to work with that it completely turned me off from the field. As with all things I'm sure there are absolutely wonderful people in the field. I didn't get to see too many of them as a medical student.

 

[Dr G Oogle]

Residents are humans, some are bad and some are good. I had an extremely negative time on my OB/Gyn rotation despite working my tail off and expressing interest in the field from day one. I got involved as a witness in a lawsuit due to how terrible one male attending treated his patients and the sexually suggestive comments he made during Gyn exams (which I reported him for and was ignored), I had two residents who would constantly bicker and try to put me and the other medical student in the middle of their arguments to take sides, I had a tech slap my hand repeatedly for doing what the attending asked during c-sections because the tech was too busy having side conversations to do her job, one resident even left her post on two separate occasions after being distinctly told NOT TO LEAVE by the chiefs to 1) get a mole removed from her face in the middle of a work day and 2) travel to Vegas for her bachelorette party which then resulted in one of the chiefs having to drive 2+ hours for a robot case which then was done without a second person certified to assist with the robot (illegal in the state they were practicing in), I was turned away from most patient rooms because of being male/med student (which is understandable but still sucks) and saw the same for male residents and attendings. But yeah, I’m probably just entitled to expect more than that from physicians. And I’m definitely a misogynist for standing up for my female patients after essentially being sexually assaulted by a male attending.

I realize that not all OBs are bad, I had some that were genuinely awesome, but I would still generalize that many OB Gyn residencies are very toxic, after experiencing several such programs first hand and being told similar stories from several more. Even my close friend going into OB/Gyn has hated nearly every rotation/interview because of how toxic the people are, but she loves what the training will lead to so she has to suffer through it.

Also, to say that you can tell which med students are going to have a good/bad time on the rotation based on how you perceive them in the first day or so is just as subjective and as much of a generalization as anything else that’s been said here tbh, and shows that you are prejudging them, thereby increasing the odds of having said outcome.

Easy bro I wasn’t singling you out just the posts on here which I’m sure you’ll agree have the tone of a complaint and misogyny with use of terms such as “emotionally labile” and “gunning cats”. Your rotation sounds like a nightmare and I’m sure you tried your hardest. But there is a tendency amongst students who have poor rotation experiences to attribute to the fact that many residents and attendings are women and that their experience is due to that fact rather than looking inward.

 

[mistafab]

Gotta say that obgyn was so fun and involved at my institution. I really enjoyed riding the wave with our program's residents in the sea of babies and aberrant bleeding.

Feel sorry for ya'll with these nasty programs.

 

[ace_inhibitor111]

Wow, and I thought my OB rotation was bad. In retrospect it was probably easier than my IM rotation.

 

[ScreamingInternally]

Easy bro I wasn’t singling you out - shouldnt have quoted me then, shouldve quoted the other poster which youre now referring to

“emotionally labile” and “gunning cats” - yeah I agree, that sounds sexist, even without context which I’m sure would only make it worse

Your rotation sounds like a nightmare - my third year was a thing of nightmares lol

 

[VA Hopeful Dr]

Easy bro I wasn’t singling you out just the posts on here which I’m sure you’ll agree have the tone of a complaint and misogyny with use of terms such as “emotionally labile” and “gunning cats”. Your rotation sounds like a nightmare and I’m sure you tried your hardest. But there is a tendency amongst students who have poor rotation experiences to attribute to the fact that many residents and attendings are women and that their experience is due to that fact rather than looking inward.

Do we see the same trend in peds?

 

[Matthew9Thirtyfive]

Do we see the same trend in peds?

I’ve actually seen quite a few posts on SDN about how peds attendings and residents can be some of the most passive aggressive people in the hospital. But it’s nowhere near the number of people who post about how awful OB/GYN is.

 

[Dr G Oogle]

Do we see the same trend in peds?

Not nearly as much but the stakes are lower and the pace is slower compared to the acuity of L&D. Excepting maybe the PICU where I hear all the time about maltreatment of trainees. I’m not saying it’s right to mistreat anyone, just that there is a double standard if a woman lashes out at a trainee in a high stress environment compared to when a man does the exact same thing

 

[RangerBob]

I though OB clinic was fun, and not very stressful. I really enjoyed the prenatal visits (we'd like the little brother/sister try to find their new brother/sister's heartbeat with the doppler).

However, L&D was the worst. It’s not even a close contest. I think our program was a particularly malignant one. The (male) chief resident was the worst/most nit-picky resident I ever worked with. Just a cruel guy to be honest. Unfortunately he was chief, so it caused downstream effects on the residents-it was pretty clear how they felt about him. Most other residents were pretty nice to me, but the bulk of my time was unfortunately with the chief. So my experience was very colored by that.

My colleagues who rotated through a private hospital (one of three rotation sites) and worked only with attendings had the complete opposite experience. The pace was better, attendings nicer, learning was far better too (they all did better on the shelf than us who rotated through the university site). Much less stress.

We had weekly M&M’s. It was the most uncomfortable thing ever. The attendings would randomly pick cases from different residents and tear up the case like no other. The resident would try to keep their composure, and the attendings would yell at each other when they disagreed over whether the treatment/surgical intervention was appropriate—and us med students were just there forced to sit and watch. It was just a miserable culture...

I think a lot of it comes down to the pace of things, and the stress that places on people. Rotations used to be about teaching and learning, and the attendings/residents would have lower caseloads to accommodate teaching med students (and residents). But now in modern times we’re expected as residents to keep up a full service and find time to teach students when we can. I can see how stressful that would get in intense environments like L&D.

 

[radsisrad]

Do Women Need More Sleep Than Men? - The Sleep Doctor

Women face unique challenges when it comes to sleep. We take a look at the reasons why women might sleep longer than men.

www.sleep.org

 

[emergentmd]

N=1 but did OB rotation as an intern 20 yrs ago and they were by far the most miserable and unfriendly by far. Gen Surg was next but they would atleast get involved in small talk.

As a med student you got to take it, and try to impress them. Doing an off rotation as an intern, it was no big deal. Did the minimum, and just stayed out of site the rest of the time.

I will say that OB has to be the most stressful field and as a resident you carry that burden x 10.

EM can be stressful but most deaths are the old/ill and most healthy never have bad outcomes.

OB is like walking a landmine daily of the healthy. Everything can go well, and you pull out a dead baby? What an emotional prison to live in.