Dr. Pamela Mehta is a general private practice orthopedic surgeon. She has been out of training now for ten years and has been in private practice for two years. We get into a great discussion about what led her to private practice, post-training, types of patients, and what she likes about orthopedics. We talk about what it's like to a be a woman in a male-dominated specialty and much more.
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Initially, Pamela didn't expect she wanted to be a surgeon because she expected she was going to find herself in primary care, her primary reason she went to medical school. In fact, she saw herself as either a pediatrician or family medicine doctor. And during her third year rotation, she put trauma surgery first, with the intention of just getting it out of the way since she wanted to practice so when she gets to the family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatric rotation, she will be in good position to get good letters.
During her first day at the trauma surgery rotation, she just couldn't believe how excited she was. She was amazed by how the ER doctors, surgeons, and nurses were working together to get the patient up into the operating room as efficiently as possible. And when she was asked to scrub in, Pamela says she will never forget that feeling. From that day on, she made a complete switch and decided she was going to do surgery.
"I could not believe how excited I was and just the adrenalin that was pumping when trauma came into the trauma bay."
It was actually a blessing in disguise when she had the whole year to figure out where she was going to do her fourth year sub-I's in. This gave her time to choose which clinical subspecialty she wanted to do.
Pamela admits that when she was still attending USC, she got told many times by other orthopedic surgeons, residents to instead do other specialities like radiology or anesthesia or PM&R. And she she didn't really understand why she can't do it as well. And she was told orthopedics was difficult in terms of lifestyle or having a family.
Good thing, she went to a very supportive residency in Columbia University in New York City and out of the six people in her class, two of them were women and the class right before them, four were women out of the six.
She felt really protected in that she never felt she was a woman there in terms of feeling discriminated against or not taken seriously. However, it was a different case when she began entering into the workforce. When she started interviewing for jobs, she faced a lot of the discrimination.
"If you are a female and you want to go into a male-dominated specialty, you absolutely should but you do have to have a thick skin. That's life."
Pamela adds that having a thick skin is important being in a male-dominated specialty. In fact, sometimes you even have to be more perfect than your male counterparts. Because when you slip on something as a female, there are those
