61–70 of 200 posts
I've always dreamed of leaving behind Silicon Valley and pursuing emergency medicine. I need to stay the course for a while to ensure my college approaching kids are taken care of but stories like this are inspiring reminders that age doesn't have to be a factor when I finally decide to make the move.
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only with specialists/subspecialists w/ procedures, or surgeons. And if not, prepare to spend a lot of overnights. Family med say $120k starting, Internal med $200k Each extra $25-50k is like another year of training at $50k.
Unsure what the US situation is, but there are a lot of benefits to earning $120k/year in a business/professional corporation vs. a salary. At least in Canada anyway.
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My wife is a resident. The salaries look nice when they're windowed to a single year. Career earnings, it's good but not that great compared to tech - especially when you consider the hours and stress. * 4 years of med school - $0 income - $40k+ of tuition * 3+ years of residency, minimum (4+ for most fields, even more for surgery) - $60k/year ------ If my wife had gone straight into tech, we'd have been better off f…
160k of tuition. 80k x 4 = 320k lost wages. 30k x 3 Delta wages. 500k in costs before your first year of big earnings. You said 30 years. I'm counting 2. Disingenuous.
Holy Shit! Imagine being the CEO of a RadioShack, then saying "I want to become a Doctor" and actually doing it. That's amazing! Love this story.
> That's amazing! Agreed. Now imagine being a similarly aged retail service worker, or agricultural laborer, and doing the same. Even more amazing, if rare. The point is: both the drive and capital are needed. This person clearly had both at their disposal.
I've always dreamed of leaving behind Silicon Valley and pursuing emergency medicine. I need to stay the course for a while to ensure my college approaching kids are taken care of but stories like this are inspiring reminders that age doesn't have to be a factor when I finally decide to make the move.
As someone who second-careered into medicine: It's a ten-year commitment, roughly, to become a practicing ER doc. And in today's industry, you'll spend the overwhelming majority of your time doing documentation on shit that should've been seen by a PCP, not an emergency department. And definitely not treating emergencies. You'll be lucky if you see one or two a day in a major ED; in smaller ED's, even one a week is o…
That said, most ED’s are not like that, and an awful lot of emergency medicine is ‘just’ careful assessment and reassurance, so I’d agree that if you don’t like the process of seeing and helping high and low acuity patients, it’s a bad career choice.
If anyone wants to chat about the pro’s and con’s of EM and career changing, happy to chat, contact info in profile
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Make sure you get a good perspective from a trusted friend in the medical community before making any big moves (if you haven't already). For the uninitiated, it's the furthest thing from a low-stress job. For some people, the passion outweighs the stress. But despite knowing countless people in medicine, I can only think of one that still professes to love her job - the rest were burned out long before covid.
As a counterpoint, nearly everyone in my family in medicine still loves it. My parents are surgeons in their sixties who don’t need to work any more. My uncles and aunts are GPs, radiologists, and anesthesiologists. My cousins are GPs, nurses, and anesthesiologists. So that’s a spectrum from 21-65 and almost all of them enjoy their jobs. The things that really bother them are poor administrators etc. They’ll quit job…
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The opportunities in tech do not provide enough leverage for meaningful progress IMHO. Personally, I believe I can do far more good writing and pushing public policy than any amount of code. That is "operating at scale".
Working on public policy is a worthwhile (and uphill) fight for sure. But it lacks imagination to suggest that impact at scale isn't possible in tech (examples: robust low cost medtech for non G7 economies, same for finance in those markets, support systems for large scale NGO efforts, access to justice efforts, etc. etc.). Clearly these opportunities exist, but they may be under resourced relative to lucrative tech…
With that said, here is my example: Medicare For All would save us $450 billion, and avoid 68k preventable deaths, every single year. I find it a stretch to suggest that ambitious goals such as that "lack imagination". Such impact is simply not obtainable with tech or NGOs alone. Even Bill Gates has needed roughly $50 billion to drive forward his foundation's humanitarian efforts (but admittedly, is very efficient, with estimates of having saved ~122 million lives through their work).
This is very inspirational. I'm applying to emergency medicine residency this year and love to see stories about how much people enjoy it. I'm curious what skills cross over from CEO to EM physician. Leadership and teamwork for sure.
Anaesthesiologist here. I did EM for 6 months and hated it. This is because it just doesn't suit my personality. To be good at EM you need to be: - Comfortable with being a kinda bad at everything and great at nothing - Comfortable with large amounts of uncertainty and risk and having to make decisions anyway - Being abused by drunk/mentally ill patients constantly - Being patronized by medical colleagues in other sp…
Of which your post here is a prime example!
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As a counterpoint, nearly everyone in my family in medicine still loves it. My parents are surgeons in their sixties who don’t need to work any more. My uncles and aunts are GPs, radiologists, and anesthesiologists. My cousins are GPs, nurses, and anesthesiologists. So that’s a spectrum from 21-65 and almost all of them enjoy their jobs. The things that really bother them are poor administrators etc. They’ll quit job…
Interesting. I've heard not great things about physician job satisfaction in the last few years, mostly centering around more time spent with billing/paperwork and less with patients.
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Make sure you get a good perspective from a trusted friend in the medical community before making any big moves (if you haven't already). For the uninitiated, it's the furthest thing from a low-stress job. For some people, the passion outweighs the stress. But despite knowing countless people in medicine, I can only think of one that still professes to love her job - the rest were burned out long before covid.
As a counterpoint, nearly everyone in my family in medicine still loves it. My parents are surgeons in their sixties who don’t need to work any more. My uncles and aunts are GPs, radiologists, and anesthesiologists. My cousins are GPs, nurses, and anesthesiologists. So that’s a spectrum from 21-65 and almost all of them enjoy their jobs. The things that really bother them are poor administrators etc. They’ll quit job…