When I was interviewing at another school, I was given the campus tour by a 4th year who was going into OB/GYN and he had this was his reasoning: OB/GYN is the perfect specialty because you get a little bit of everything. You have the intimacy of family medicine (and then some), but you are less concentrated on diabetes and heart disease. You get the drama of emergency medicine, only concentrated because all of your cases are actually life and death. You are mostly concerned with internal medicine, but you get to do legitimate surgery fairly regularly. Unlike other fields where patient compliance is a big problem, your patients are incredibly receptive because they're hormonally charged with protective instincts (his words, not mine).
The speaker today was Dr. Howard Blanchette who is apparently quite the bigwig in OB/GYN. He shared his story and why he chose this specialty and then shared stories to exemplify the joys and sorrows of the field. My takeaway: it seems like an wildy rewarding career, if you can handle the ups and downs. He also described the dramatic change in gender ratio of OB/GYN physicians from when he was in residency (95% men in 1972) to today (80% women), and stressed that it doesn't matter so long as you are skilled at your craft and listen to your patients.
TI reL: I'm pretty sure I have heard this before, but as I apparently learned very little of interest today, I wanted to share this anyways. Duchenne's muscular dystrophy is caused by the dysfunction of the dystrophin protein (biologists can be rather dry in their naming of things (though there are exceptions)). The discovery of dystrophin marked the first time scientists were able to find the cause of a disease by first finding a genetic mutation, sequencing the normal gene, and then finding the protein for which the gene coded.
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