I am a men’s health specialist, but I started out as a urologist. Not a bad place to begin as urology is a great discipline. It focuses on the upper and lower urinary tracts of males and females and the reproductive tracts of men. If you ever have a kidney stone (and I pray you don’t) then you will come to know a urologist.
Why Urology?
Admittedly, urology is a small, unusual and low-key medical specialty. In fact, for the longest time, my parents didn’t know exactly what I did as a doctor. I kind of like that about it. Feel free to choose a more glamorous, chest pounding, field like neurosurgeon or heart surgery if you like. I’ll stick with urology, thank you. It’s a fantastic balance of medicine and surgery, and involves the care of both adults and kids and men and women. All you have to do is get through six years of surgical training after medical school to join the crowd!
Spreading the Word
Since my time as a decorated professor at UCSF, I have been committed to getting students interested in our little corner of the medical world. This effort has resulted in the publication of a national curriculum for teaching urology to U.S. medical students now hosted on our leading society’s website. As popular as it has become, it is really an essential national resource for the field of urology as it slowly gets squeezed out of the tight, full schedules of medical students nationwide. For some reason, pharmacogenomics now matters more than prostate cancer in medical school.
Even with this under my belt, I felt that more was needed to get students turned on to our specialty. We needed to hear from real life urologists, both those in training and at the top of their game, and see why they chose this field. The field is ripe with superb mentors and I wanted to show them off. So, with the help of our national society, we recently created a short video in which urologists talk about why they chose this field. Well, “Why Urology?” has certainly hit the ground running, and just garnered a national marketing award in its first several months of life!
Love what you do, make a difference doing it and spread the word. These are the tenets of my life in medicine.
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