Which class of people are generally happier: general surgeons or anesthesiologists?

Answers:
People who are drawn to these fields are inherently different, and once they enter training, they are socialized and indoctrinated in very different ways. Since you cannot randomize twins into the two fields in any meaningful number, you'll never know, even if there IS a happier group, whether it was happy people who initially made the choice or whether they got happy once they arrived.I am a general surgeon and overall a pretty happy person. I can certainly say that I have a higher stress job and more reason to occassionally become angry than an anesthesiologist. I can even become angry at anesthesiologists! However, the operating room is an unbelievably fantastic place to work, and many of my anesthesia colleagues and I are more than pleased to be working on the same case together. At the end of the day, when we all go home, my good days make me feel like I've really accomplished something important, and I really ride those experiences high. However, when I have a bad day, I garuntee there is some poor soul who had the worst day of their life, and very possibly their last. I suffer those days pretty hard. I can feel ill, lose sleep, and sometimes it takes me weeks to recover. Anesthesiologists do not ride that roller coaster at all. Most of them wouldn't want to. Many of them wouldn't be able to handle it, if they tried! Whether or not that tells you which ones of us are generally happier, it at least tells you that my profession admits of higher highs and lower lows. I'd say that the people who gravitate to general surgery are the ones for whom this ride is one of the things that tends to make them happy. Anesthesiologists, who have decided in medical school that they want to work in the OR without a high stress lifestyle, have accurately assessed that a more detatched and less stressful relationship to patient care is what would make them happy. Many of them choose this field based on lifestyle.

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anesthesiologists :-)

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I think surgeons, bec they get to see all part of the human body one at a time at their own whims and fancies where as anesthe..get to see the whole person either dead or alive.

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general surgeons by far. if you look at the 'sources of narcissism' (this based sort of on Heinz Kohut's understanding), generally anaesthesiologists, much as psychiatrists and those in the dental care fiel are the ones with the lowest sources (and thus the lowest 'income' for self-esteem), conversely having the highest suicide rates.Simple explanation: when a surgery goes well everyone congratulates the surgeon but how many congratulate the anaesthesiologist? but then when it goes wrong, the anaesthesiologist definetly has something to do.I the case of the psychiatrists, it's simply because of the lack of results derived from this practice.one day you think there's a big improvement with a major depression- next day the person jumped out of a window.anaesthesiologists study way too much to get so little reward. two people you should never say 'wrong' to in school: anaesthesiologists and internists.

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I've never seen an anesthesiologist raise his voice. Does that help?

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an anesthesiologist would be happier because they don't have as much pressure on them as a surgeon. surgeons have a lot more responsiblities for obvious reasons. both physicians do have to be on call.

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