> You should become a doc because you always wanted to work for Medecins Sans Frontières and your life will be half-lived without that.
Everything else was just whiny bullshit.
Why you should not go to medical school
51–60 of 186 posts
Re: Why you should not go to medical school
#52One could say the same for any given field from sports to programming to business to pet-sitting. It's a hard knock life for us all. None of these reasons should have stopped any decent doctor from taking the path. The single reason would be: Don't go into medical school if you care more about money and an easy-going life than the actual field and people involved. And the same applies to every single field.
"None of these reasons should have stopped any decent doctor from taking the path. " Here's part of the problem. You don't know what it's like to be a doctor, until you become a doctor. I think that's somewhat unique to the field. You can go into it with the right intentions, but it's not like people doctor as a hobby or as a passion and then decide to go into it. It's not like being a musician, or a programmer, spor…
You don't know what it's like to be a doctor, until you become a doctor. I think that's somewhat unique to the field.
No, it's like that in a lot of fields.
Obviously, many jobs have a much lower barrier to entry than "doctor" -- it takes years of work to reach the point where you can understand what doctoring is like first-hand -- but I've found most jobs fall into one of these categories:
A) The problems with the job don't always manifest until you're months or years into it, whether it's long-term boredom, lack of opportunity for advancement, chronic occupational injury, or rare but awful events. (Soldiering is a lot more fun before you're under fire than afterwards.)
B) It's not so hard to be a happy amateur, but the amateur experience is much different from the pro experience. Pros need to make money, consistently, and that is a big constraint, often to the point that it takes an entirely different skill set. (e.g. Being a freelance programmer or musician is as much about marketing and customer service as it is about code or music, and the stuff that's valuable to customers may be boring to the point of tears for you. Ask a classical musician to tell you how they feel about the inexplicably popular Pachelbel's Canon.)
C) And, of course, jobs with barriers to entry are hard to really understand until the barriers are down. Research has a whole series of barriers: Being a science major is not like being a grad student, being a grad student is not like being a postdoc, being a postdoc is not like being a junior prof.
Mind you, though you can never know what it is really like to do a job without doing it, you can interview people and get some big hints. And you'll find that medicine is actually pretty easy to research, as careers go. The OP's points are not hidden mysteries. They have been made before. There are a lot of doctors, both successful ones and burned-out ones, and they're happy to talk. The trick is to be able to listen to what they tell you, and unfortunately there are also a lot of teachers and parents who are happy to push you into medicine regardless of what the actual doctors are telling you.
Re: Why you should not go to medical school
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
$45/year for residents. At that point you're still basically an apprentice doctor.
Right. Turns out I completely misunderstood every sentence that contains "resident" in that article, then :-) Thanks for pointing it all out. Does make his argument about the bad money bogus though. Nearly every other job is worse money than being a doctor (which is why he compared to investment bankers and the likes)
Well, the things is that if you include resident medecine studies are really long. So:
* You'd have to average for a life time of work
* You need to make sure you subtract the cost of studies (although in US pretty much any study costs a ridiculous amount of money)
* You may also want to take into account that you start making a good salary late in your life, at a time you'd need some (like when you want to buy your first house)
Anyway, I don't know about US but in France doctors are not that bad. They have pretty competitive studies and they also have a few resident years, but they don't have to pay for study (as for any student) and pretty soon they get their well paid job. They also don't have as many stupid trials as in US.
Re: Why you should not go to medical school
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One could say the same goes for any given field Please name a sport, business, or other profession that involves staying up 40 hours straight unshowered, unfed, on a routine basis, for years, trying to not die or get anyone killed. I can think of only two: medicine and the military. I do both. They're roughly equal. Given the choice between residency and deployment, I would need more information. edit: Actually, I'…
"... Please name a sport, business, or other profession that involves staying up 40 hours straight unshowered, unfed, on a routine basis, for years, trying to not die or get anyone killed. ..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infantry
So... the military, just as the commenter you replied to already noted?
Re: Why you should not go to medical school
#55Great article and on point.
A former flatmate of mine committed suicide about 1.5 years after I left the flat, which I did due to his erratic and hostile behavior toward me, which I think was due to a number of factors, but mainly his stress from an intense hospital residency while he also did further study simultaneously.
There's an article mentioning him here: http://vitualis.files.wordpress.com/2006/09/action_vow.pdf
The danger zone for med students is when they sacrifice themselves and tolerate all the reasons that the Harvard article states why not to go to med school, because of the idealistic notion that:
"You have only ever envisioned yourself as a doctor and can only derive professional fulfillment in life by taking care of sick people."
As such, these smart and ambitious med students shoot for the moon, and due to the reasons in the article, realize that they won't make the moon (ie earn that fellowship, obtain that degree, receive that certification, get that promotion) and then they feel that their life is a failure, or won't have any further meaning the way they wanted it to, and then they kill themselves, because they have no exit strategy (or plan B) and are ill themselves.
There's nothing noble about the suicide of med students and interns, but I've seen how it happens right up close. I have further thoughts on the matter but that's the core of my experience regarding the negatives of this career path.
Re: Why you should not go to medical school
#56Some of the comments on that page are even better than the main article/rant: "Last note, what bullshit is it that your plumber can charge whatever he wants to unclog your drain, but if I replace both knees the insurance companies automatically take 50% off the second. What am I, fucking Payless?"
That's not a great analogy. The insurance companies have negotiated a fixed rate with the hospital, and so if you work for the hospital, of course you must honor it. Same as if you were a plumber working for a large plumbing corporation, which had a contract with its clients. In that case, if you unclogged the drains at BigCorp, you would not be able to charge whatever you want, but only the rate BigCorp had negotiated with your employer.
Re: Why you should not go to medical school
#57So, surprisingly, this rant is more or less accurate, imo. (I went to med school, residency, fellowship) I mean some things stronger than others, but it hits on the major negatives as you go through training. I know a lot of these rants tend to romanticize how hard people's own professions are in a "no one else has it this hard" type stance. We see similar "how hard it is to be a programmer" type rants as well. But,…
I had a different experience. Medical school was easy, I was single and went out drinking / partying two or three nights a week. Not to be crass, but I did well with the ladies. Luckily I can get by on four hours of sleep or less. So, I don't feel like I missed out on much of the early twenties experience. Most of my non-medical friends had jobs and I didn't, but that was the only real difference. Things got a little…
Thank you for your honesty.
May I ask, what exactly do you do that you feel justifies your 800k per year? It seems to me that your career is ripe for disruption.
Re: Why you should not go to medical school
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd argue that this sort of article applies mostly to the "glamourous" professions -- things that kids want to be when they grow up, jobs that will impress your nephews. Actor, musician, doctor, certain varieties of lawyer, physicist cough , athlete, artist, airline pilot. These sorts of professions have a ready supply of suckers wanting in, which means that the competition is tough, the work is hard and the compensa…
Being a doctor doesn't take 8+ years of education just because it's a competitive field.
No, but the bit after you finish medical school and spend the next eight or twelve years as a sleep-deprived zombie working thirty-hour shifts for a crappy salary at a hospital you probably didn't choose is due to it being a competitive field.
Re: Why you should not go to medical school
#59So, surprisingly, this rant is more or less accurate, imo. (I went to med school, residency, fellowship) I mean some things stronger than others, but it hits on the major negatives as you go through training. I know a lot of these rants tend to romanticize how hard people's own professions are in a "no one else has it this hard" type stance. We see similar "how hard it is to be a programmer" type rants as well. But,…
I had a different experience. Medical school was easy, I was single and went out drinking / partying two or three nights a week. Not to be crass, but I did well with the ladies. Luckily I can get by on four hours of sleep or less. So, I don't feel like I missed out on much of the early twenties experience. Most of my non-medical friends had jobs and I didn't, but that was the only real difference. Things got a little…
Lesson learned: If you do fine without sleep, and manage to wind up in the most lucrative specialty^, medicine may just be for you!
Speaking as the son of a psychiatrist who didn't marry a radiologist: you got lucky, and your wife got luckier. Good for you guys, but that's not what a student should expect from med school any more than a CS student should expect a $10mm exit.
^Barring, what, the specialized surgeries?
Re: Why you should not go to medical school
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd argue that this sort of article applies mostly to the "glamourous" professions -- things that kids want to be when they grow up, jobs that will impress your nephews. Actor, musician, doctor, certain varieties of lawyer, physicist cough , athlete, artist, airline pilot. These sorts of professions have a ready supply of suckers wanting in, which means that the competition is tough, the work is hard and the compensa…
Last I heard actuarial science is brutally competitive and quickly becoming a slog. Apparently all the asian math geniuses see it as their only way to please their grandparents without switching to medicine or law.
How depressing.