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The story
A thread went up on 5ch’s “Nandemo Jikkyou G” (Live Anything) board where a med student pumped himself up, declaring, “I studied like crazy and finally got my medical license… now, time to fix everyone’s anuses!”
The thread kicked off with jokes about what proctologists are even for and cracks like “they stare at other people’s anuses 24/7, 365 days a year,” before spiraling into a broader debate about the popularity and pecking order of different medical specialties — OB-GYN, pediatrics, psychiatry, cardiac surgery, and more.
What people said
Well yeah, when all you look at is other people's anuses 24/7, 365 days a year, your personality's bound to get twisted.
Come on, they must have SOME time when they're not looking at anuses.
We're not kids here.
If cosmetic surgeons vanished, nobody would care, but if doctors who actually treat disease disappear, we're the ones who'd suffer — I don't get what people are trying to accomplish.
Internally, up to the sigmoid colon?
Externally, all the way to the crack??
Even our OB-GYN professor said, "I probably shouldn't say this, but honestly, we really wish more male students would go into obstetrics and gynecology."
Surprisingly, a lot of women have hemorrhoids too, so patients aren't scarce.
And there's basically no risk of a fatal medical accident.
If a proctologist only treated hemorrhoids, sure, but in reality they're GI surgeons who also handle tough procedures like the Hartmann procedure, so other departments actually respect them.
Seriously, nobody wanted it.
Cardiac surgery.
You need to be smart AND have the stamina to pull three straight all-nighters.
I guess even among doctors there's some kind of caste system, huh 😔
It'd be great if the whole world thought like you (stares off into the distance)
Psychiatry is necessary too.
They're working hard to keep 200,000 long-term inpatients from being released back into general society.
At this rate, obstetrics/gynecology is headed for collapse.
With the birth rate falling, the number of doctors needed is dropping too, so it probably balances out.
Female doctors tend not to want night shifts, so you should just assume nighttime deliveries won't be a thing anymore.
I went to a private proctology clinic first and it was awful — they just dragged the treatment out.
Dermatology was awful too.
I wanted a cyst removed from a sensitive area ASAP, but they just kept stalling with medication. A full year later I finally got a referral to a big hospital and got it fixed with surgery.
Other people's mouths are nasty.
Background and Key Points
Med student proctology thread → English closer.
**Background readers need:** Japan’s medical hierarchy runs partly on prestige and lifestyle. Proctology (肛門科, kōmonka) is a real subspecialty of gastrointestinal surgery, not just hemorrhoid-popping — treating anal fistulas, hemorrhoids, and procedures like the Hartmann operation. It survives in Japan through a network of dedicated specialty clinics (専門クリニック) alongside hospital GI-surgery departments, a setup less common in the US or UK, where colorectal issues mostly funnel through general/colorectal surgery. On the other end of the debate, OB-GYN (産婦人科) has a well-documented staffing crisis: grueling night shifts for deliveries, high malpractice liability, and a shrinking pool of male applicants — a professor’s on-record plea in the thread (“we really wish more male students would go into obstetrics”) reflects a real recruitment problem discussed in Japanese medical education circles for years.
**Where the thread split:** Not on whether proctology matters — nobody argued that — but on rank. Posters diverged over whether “necessary/undesirable” specialties like proctology and psychiatry deserve more respect than their reputation suggests, versus a competing view that pediatrics and OB-GYN are the true bottom-tier postings because of pay, hours, and lawsuit risk, while cardiac surgery sits at the top purely on difficulty and stamina.
**What outsiders likely miss:** The debate says nothing about reimbursement rates — in Japan’s national health insurance (fee schedule) system, procedural specialties like surgery and cardiac surgery are compensated far better per hour than cognitive/talk-heavy fields like psychiatry or general pediatrics, which is a bigger driver of the pecking order than posters here admit.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyou G) thread “Med Student: “Phew… Phew… I studied so hard and finally got my medical license…! Now! Let’s go fix everyone’s anuses!” → Becomes a proctologist.”
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