The Universal Hot-Crazy Matrix of Medical Specialties

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BOSTON -- OK, so this is the Universal Hot-Crazy Matrix of Medical Specialties. It's everything a young medical student needs to know about picking the specialty that matches their own desire for hotness balanced against their own tolerance of craziness. We have developed this over our collective 54 years in medicine.

So this is how it works. You have your crazy axis and your hot axis. Hot is, as usual, measured from 0 to 10. We're all familiar with that. Crazy is measured from 4 to 10 because of course there's no such thing as a physician who is not at least a 4 crazy. No one less than a 4 crazy agrees to spend most of college actually studying followed by 4 years busting their asses to get through med school. So crazy goes from 4 to 10. In the middle is your hot crazy line, very important that you keep in mind where the hot-crazy line is. Your goal, if you're a normal sane person, is to pick a specialty below the hot crazy line, that is a specialty that's at least as hot as it is crazy.

The Official Hot-Crazy Matrix of Medicine:

Let's talk about a couple sample specialties. Nephrology is about as unhot as a specialty gets, but it's also not real crazy, nephrologist parties are lame. They straddle the hot-crazy axis about as low as you go. ER is for crazy people, we all know this. It's not super hot, no one says: "Oh man, you're an ER doctor, that's hot," at least no one we know. ER doctors are only slightly less crazy and slightly hotter than their patients. Even psychiatry is hotter than ER because at least they have regular work hours.

The hottest specialties are clearly ortho (biceps), neurosurgery (brains), and plastic surgery (all the other hot parts) with progressively increasing levels of crazy with plastic surgeons only being out-crazed by ob/gyn, who will literally have a new hair color every delivery. Its almost like they dye their hair with whatever combination of fluids ends up in that creepy little bag at the end of the bed they have.

ID, GI, and pathology are as unhot as you get, nothing about infections, poop, and dead people/dead parts of live people is hot. Radiology is the medical equivalent of 7 minutes in heaven with people who prefer to stay in their own corner of the closet the whole time. Not hot.

General surgery used to be hotter, but ever since losing their territory faster than the British Empire, not so much. At this pace, general surgery is going to pop up next to GI on the hot-crazy matrix in the next couple of years.

*This chart was not approved by the FDA, TJC, NIH, CDC, OPP, CIA, FBI, DEA, WWE, WWF, or NWA.


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