4 Comments so far

1. grimmyTe

   Yes.
   In theory, a pediatric surgeon could be a pediatrician also, but not in practice. Pediatric surgeons are extremely busy because there aren’t enough of them (there aren’t enough qualified training programs to produce new ones). At my hospital, we had a stretch when there was only one pediatric surgeon on staff for about three months. He was in the operating room about 6 days a week for about 6-12 hours a day. When you are tied up in the operating room that much, you don’t have time to take care of kids with medical illnesses too. Besides that, most surgeons would shoot themselves if they had to take care of complicated medical illnesses too–they went into surgery for a reason.
   One little addendum I want to make to Doctor K’s answer–you can do a Pediatric Surgery fellowship straight out of General Surgery residency, but the others he mentioned are not subspecialties of Pediatric Surgery. If you want to go into Pediatric Orthopedics, you typically have to do an Orthopedic residency first. Similarly if you want to go into Pediatric Cardiac Surgery, you have to do an adult Cardiothoracic fellowship first.
   Besides being fun to work with kids, Pediatric Surgery is also the only true general surgery field that hasn’t fallen into extreme subspecialization. The trend in surgery these days is to for surgeons to carve themselves into niches. They make themselves the “best” at one or two things, then that’s all they do. A Pediatric Surgeon on the other hand has to be able to handle almost anything from the neck to the pelvis. If you’re out in the boondocks where there aren’t any other pediatric specialists, you may have to do even more.

2. Doctor K

   You can be a pediatric surgeon and go into sub-specialties such as orthopedics, cardiovascular, general pediatric surgery too. In this specialty, you will have to take 5-6 year residency in general surgery. You can then take about a two year fellowship in pediatric surgery. Within this field, you will explore all the things general surgery has to offer, but just on kids. Hope I helped.

3. nobigger

   Yes. After four years of medical school you would do a residency in general surgery (5 years) and then sub specialize in your area of interest (orthopaedics, colon/rectal, cardio/thorasic) which takes anywhere from 2-3 more years, then you would do another 1-2 years for pediatrics in that area and possibly another 1 year fellowship in pediatric research. Pediatric surgeons, generally have the worst lifestyle and longest residency of any physician (I was told by a cardio/thorasic surgeon, they average between 100-120 hrs per week).
   I’m a medical student

4. Daisy

   Absolutely! Im not sure though if you can be a pediatrist and a pediatric surgeon at the same time. You have to choose one or the other. But if you are a surgeon, its kind of like being a pediatrist because you still have to follow up on the patient and see them…