Dr. Catherine Mcilhany is a community-based General Pediatrician. She joined us to talk about her position and her path and what you need to know.
We're constantly looking for guests that we can feature here in the podcast. It has been a challenge for us. Please shoot me an email at ryan@medicalschoolhq.net if you know any specialists that you would like to have on the show.
Back to today's episode, Catherine has been in practice now for 15 years. Several weeks ago, I talked with a rural General Pediatrician. So you get to hear some differences between rural medicine and a community-based, urban center general pediatrics.
It was during her third pediatric rotation that she realized she wanted to do pediatrics. She just had so much fun with the kids and that's what she liked about it. She admires the resilience of kids despite what they're going through.
"If you can have some fun almost everyday in some part of your job, it's totally worth it."
She did consider doing OB/GYN but then she got into rotations and realized she didn't want to be a surgeon of any type. She also thought about doing Med-Peds but she found the scope of family medicine was so broad that she was worried there would be so much to have to know all the time. She was looking for something narrower. And after doing her adult medicine rotations, she realized she wanted to stick with the kids.
That said, Catherine likes working with the parents. A big part of what they do is educating parents and sometimes, crisis management. She describes it as a little intimidating thinking that you're taking care of the most important person in most people's lives. Hence, you have to interact with adults as well.
Med-Peds is a combined specialty of internal medicine and pediatrics training so you would be fully qualified to do the full scope of adult internal medicine plus pediatrics care. So it's like Family Medicine except that you're not doing GYN procedures like Family Medicine might do. So you don't have the OB and some of the more specific GYN type.
In a day, he will see everything from a 3-day-old to a 19-year-old. She had seen a 19-year-old having some schizophrenic break to a diagnosed cancer. She does see a lot of healthy children. She works in a population of a fair number of kids who are really struggling in school. She sees a lot of behavior issues in her office. She also sees a fair amount of contraception counseling, sexually transmitted disease testing in teenagers. So it's an interesting scope of diseases that they see in pediatrics, which is quite opposite to what most people probably think that they're only seeing cold cases.
"The hard thing about pediatrics is that you'll see a lot of kids with the same chief complaint, but you have to be able to find the one that has something that's unusual."
Although children may have a chief complaint, the hard thing about it is that you have to be able to find the one that's unusual. Hence, you need to be well-trained in seeing a high volume of kids and always thinking who's going to be the "zebra out of all these horses."
Catherine admits having worked in an academic setting. But she knew she didn't want to do academic general pediatrics, which involves doing research since it wasn't really her interest.
Then when she went into general pediatrics to be a regular primary care pediatrician, she thought getting her feet wet and figure out doing it before she'd teach the residents. Although now, she's in the position where she has been doing it for four years now so she feels more comfortable.
Catherine doesn't do any inpatient or...
