Preventive medicine is the specialty with the highest lifestyle balance, while neurosurgery is the lowest, according to a Marit Health report.
Marit analyzed more than 24,400 anonymous salary and schedule surveys from full-time physicians to create the Lifestyle Balance Index. It includes five factors that impact lifestyle: average weekly hours, schedule quality based on the proportion of weekday, day-shift and shorter-shift work, call burden, percent clinical time and average annual PTO. Each factor was normalized so that 1.0 represented the all-specialty average.
Here is how 36 specialties rank in the Lifestyle Balance Index.
- Preventive medicine: 1.5
- Dermatology: 1.44
- Allergy and immunology: 1.39
- Rheumatology: 1.34
- Psychiatry: 1.33
- Family medicine: 1.3
- Physical medicine and rehabilitation: 1.27
- Oral maxillofacial surgery: 1.26
- Ophthalmology: 1.22
- Endocrinology: 1.22
- Radiation oncology: 1.2
- Urgent care: 1.18
- Internal medicine: 1.18
- Podiatry: 1.13
- Pathology: 1.12
- Radiology: 1
- Otolaryngology: 0.98
- Neurology: 0.97
- Emergency medicine: 0.95
- Gastroenterology: 0.94
- Infectious disease: 0.92
- Pediatrics: 0.92
- Hematology oncology: 0.88
- Urology: 0.87
- Plastic surgery: 0.85
- Orthopedic surgery: 0.82
- Hospital medicine: 0.81
- Pulmonology: 0.81
- Nephrology: 0.72
- Cardiology: 0.72
- Pulmonary and critical care: 0.65
- Anesthesiology: 0.64
- OB-GYN: 0.64
- Critical care: 0.64
- Surgery: 0.61
- Neurosurgery: 0.5
