Imagine one day, you wake up believing your cat is a hat. Before you know it, you're having deep and intense conversations with yourself in the mirror and believing everything politicians say in their speeches. Clearly, there is something seriously wrong with your brain. Who do you call? Ghostbusters.

Ahem, sorry. Your neurologist.

You see a general practitioner for health checkups, a dentist for your teeth, a periodontist for your gums, and a podiatrist for your feet...but who do you see when your brain goes haywire? A neurologist, of course.

Neurologists are doctors specializing in the brain, spinal cord, and nervous system. Becoming an expert on the body's most complex organ takes time. More specifically, it takes four years of undergraduate science, four years of medical school, a one-year internship, and three years of residency training (source). It doesn't take a brain surgeon to tell you that you'll need to really like science, the brain, and school. Or at least, have enough patience, forethought, and grim determination to be able to stick out final exams, twenty-hour residency shifts, and all-nighters for more than a decade.

Of course, it will pay off. Literally. Average salaries for physicians and surgeons is $190,000 (source). For doctors with specialties like a neurologist, it's even higher. The average salary for those doctors is roughly $360,000 (source). Neurologists can specialize even further, in niche areas like sleep medicine, pain management, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, and so on.

But you know all that. If you're considering becoming a neurologist, you're not choosing between a career in medicine and working at the local Foot Locker. Why should you become a neurologist?

Just one reason: You really, really like the brain and the spinal cord. Your favorite TV programs are feature-film length documentaries on the neuronal circuits of zebra fish. When you offer a guest a drink, you're always explaining that thirst is really an instinct regulated by a negative feedback loop involving the brain and the other organs in the body. When your friends have a headache, you instinctively diagnose them for brain tumors. If only they'd let you biopsy them....

Compared to other professions in medicine, however, being a neurologist isn't all it's cracked up to be. First, there's the low pay. Woah, woah, woah. We know. Nearly $200,000 per year isn't technically "low." But you'll make nearly twice as much specializing in orthopedics, cardiology, urology, gastroenterology...and pretty much all the other—ologies.

Given the soul-crushing amount of work involved in being a doctor already, is your fascination with the brain worth $200,000 to you? Talk about a question of the head or the heart....

The second reason why you should think twice before becoming a neurologist: Do you know what a neurological exam even is? It's the most time-consuming and detailed of any medical examination—and you do them all. day. long.

Okay, how many fingers am I holding up? I'm actually hoping you can tell me, because I've given so many of these today I can't even tell anymore. (Source)

First, you do all the normal stuff: posture, vital signs, blood pressure. Second, you conduct a mini mental status exam (basically listening to the patient blab about their life). Third, you look up the patient's nose and make them follow your pen (i.e. the cranial nerve exam). Fourth, rev your engines because it's time for the motor system. Undress the patient (or they can undress themselves), hold their hands, now play patty-cake...or test the adduction and abduction of their legs by feeling their thighs. Fifth, time to get sensitive—er sensory. Prick the patient with a needle at more than a dozen nerve roots. Sixth, deep tendon reflexes test. Otherwise known as, the Test in Which You Hit the Patient With a Hammer. Seventh, the coordination, gait, and Rhomberg Test (source). Don't worry about what they are; just know that they are more sitting, standing, moving, poking, and prodding.

Now do that sequence of steps for the next forty years of your life.

Look into my eyes....that's right...ignore the alien-looking white nodes covering my head and giving you access to my brain.(Source)

Still need another reason not to become a neurologist? After you're done with those tests, you'll need to figure out what's wrong with your patient. And in neurology, there are far fewer procedures available than in other specialties. There is the EEG, the EEG, and, well...the EEG.

So why become a neurologist? There are 24,000 neurologists in the American Academy of Neurology, so the field must have some appeal. Aside from the magical, mystical, amazing beauty of the brain, neurology is also a relatively new and rapidly changing field. If you're interested in helping people with unexplained illnesses, then neurology gives very important background information into those diseases.

Assuming you make it through medical school (easier said than done), and you're looking for a comfortable living in a house with six bedrooms and four baths, then you can't go wrong as a neurologist. If you aren't obsessed with brains, though, you may want to focus on some other specialty—if you want more money, that is. Pulmonology, anyone? 

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