Physicians are hardly the shining beacons of maintaining work-life balance, but a growing number of medical students would beg to differ. Many in the upcoming med school classes have found a way to get a doctor’s generous payday without the notoriously long hours associated with the career. They do it by practicing dermatology.
“It’s one of the only fields where you can work 40 hours a week like a normal person,” Dr. Lindsey Zubritsky, a dermatologist in Ocean Springs, Miss., who sees patients three days a week, told The Wall Street Journal.
A discipline built on identifying and treating skin conditions, dermatology is largely a preventative practice, allowing physicians in the field to mostly avoid emergency calls, weekend hours, and late-night emails. The flexibility means many have four-day work weeks. The discipline’s unsparing salary is just as enticing; dermatologists earn a median salary of $541,000 annually, according to the Medical Group Management Association, WSJ reported. According to Doximity & Curative’s 2023 Physician Compensation Report, dermatologists earn an average salary of $468,000 a year.
For millennial and Gen Z doctors demanding work-life balance in a career track infamous for crushing hopes of it, dermatology has become an appealing track. There’s been a 15% increase of MD applicants in dermatology in the U.S. from 2022 to 2024, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges. While there’s been more applicants, there aren’t many more job openings, as dermatology ranks the second-most competitive medical discipline to break into, second only to plastic surgery, according to medical school admissions consultancy Inspira Advantage. By comparison, other physicians paid in the half-a-million-dollar range include anesthesiology, gastroenterology, radiology, and neurology, according to Inspira Advantage.
Dermatology is “ungodly competitive,” said Zubritsky, who goes by DermGuru on Instagram.
Dermatology owes its rise in popularity, in part, to the viral “dermfluencer” or “skinfluencer” trends gripping TikTok users. The social media platform has become a cornucopia of knowledge on products from hydrating snail mucin serums to pore-shrinking retinoids, helping dermatologists like Zubritsky, who boasts 1.3 million Instagram followers, spread understanding of skin science.
This wave of content creation is hardly reserved for just medical professionals. Influencers—MD…
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