Day in the life of
Spine Surgeon – Antonio J. Webb, MD
Working life for a Spine Surgeon varies by your practice type and setting including location. This can range from a moderately busy practice in a rural area to a very busy practice in a metropolitan area near a large trauma center. I don’t think there is anything typical about what we do as surgeons, but it usually starts off by either seeing patients in the office and evaluating them before and after surgery or treating patients with conservative treatment that doesn’t require surgery. Some days are spent in the operating room and other days are spent in the clinic or in the hospital seeing patients as consults.
Days usually start around 7 AM (sometimes earlier) and can run until the work is done which some nights it’s five or 6 PM and other nights there could be surgeries that last a little bit longer. In between all this, meetings are usually held. Our responsibilities are to diagnose and treat musculoskeletal conditions, nerve, and spinal cord conditions.
Pros
Pros of being a surgeon are that you are able to help patients when they are at some of the lowest points of their life and the gratification that you get when patients do well after surgery. Also, surgeons do get compensated well which can be a plus after going through 10 to 15 years of training.
Cons
Cons of being a surgeon include a busy lifestyle, hard to separate your life from your professional job, and the duration of training that it takes to get to this point. To become a surgeon, requires four years of college, four years of medical school, and six years of surgery training.
