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!
Urology is classified as a surgical specialty, knowledge of internal medicine, pediatrics, gynecology, and other specialties is required by the urologist due to the wide variety of clinical problems in patients.
- Pediatric Urology
- Urologic Oncology (cancer)
- Renal Transplantation
- Male Infertility
- Calculi (urinary tract stones)
- Female Urology (urinary incontinence and pelvic outlet relaxation disorders)
- Neurourology (voiding disorders, urodynamic evaluation of patients and erectile dysfunction or impotence).