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The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)

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Re: The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)

#211

Post by Spooky23 »

hn976827 wrote: post #129
jimmydddd wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The job security issue is huge. Many of my tech and finance friends in their early 50's are getting pushed out of their jobs, while my physician friends in their 60's can keep their career as long as they want. A family member recently visited a dr. in his late 70's.

Difference is that in tech you can retire with 50. Few people who still work at 70 do so by choice.

If you got on the FANG train around the time they dropped the standards and kept the comp going.

Tech is boom/bust. Ask a grandpa who worked for DEC in the 80s how that worked out for him.

Re: The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)

#212

Post by 2b3a51 »

Retric wrote: post #128
2b3a51 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK: there was a proposal to introduce weekend surgery to make better use of operating theatres. The problem is staffing the facilities. Lead times on training people are long. And in UK the training process is not cheap and has significant up-front costs for the people being trained. Nurses as well as surgeons. We used to have bursaries to cover the cost of training for nurses, but, austerity and all.

That seems backwards, unless you also need to be preforming more surgeries and thus need more people. Instead reduce the number of operating theaters while keeping a similar number of people. Net result same amount of operations, but lower capital expenditure. Of course you now need to pay people more to be working in the weekends, but that’s a different question.

Yes, the UK needs more surgery capacity.

Re: The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)

#213

Post by nostrademons »

the_d3f4ult wrote: post #62

Being a physician is a horrible career move right now. As a former Math/CS major turned eye surgeon, I can't help but think about how much easier my life would be had I stuck with tech. It's hard to understand exactly how hard the job is until you've lived it. I saw 40 patient's in clinic today in 8 hours without lunch or any kind of downtime and then spent 2 hours at the hospital because a patient needed an emergent…

Tech is temporary, though. The reason salaries (and profits) are so high is because tech companies, when successful, displace whole industries and capture the revenue in a more labor-efficient way. But once the industry has been displaced, you don't need the software engineers anymore. Eventually the tech company becomes a dinosaur that the finance department milks for profits and share buybacks, and then gets replaced by a younger, hotter tech company.

If you ask 40+ year old software engineers, the biggest problem with the profession is the need to re-train every 5-10 years or face obsolescence. I'm in my early 40s, been doing this 20 years, and I've re-trained 4 times on new technology before finally switching into management. I just had an emergency medical procedure done. My surgeon graduated medical school in 1981, before I was born. He's able to learn one set of skills and then keep milking it for 40+ years.

Re: The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)

#214

Post by NemoNobody »

the_d3f4ult wrote: post #62

Being a physician is a horrible career move right now. As a former Math/CS major turned eye surgeon, I can't help but think about how much easier my life would be had I stuck with tech. It's hard to understand exactly how hard the job is until you've lived it. I saw 40 patient's in clinic today in 8 hours without lunch or any kind of downtime and then spent 2 hours at the hospital because a patient needed an emergent…

I understand your situation - it's all of our lives too. Nobody that works for a living has had a raise compared to inflation, all of us have less than we ought to.

Tech is a terrible place to be employed right now - at least you will still have a job for the foreseeable future.

Plus, if your income is around the average eye surgeon salaries in the US (250k-300k according to some random website) - your income places you in the 97th percentile.

I'm not saying you should suck it up and deal with it - not at all, this is wrong and you feel the way you do for a reason. It isn't your fault anymore than it's someone's fault for getting stuck at a dead end job.

We are all in the same boat... except for those in super yachts.

The truth is simply that most people are far worse off than you. Except for the billionaires, we are all poor.

Re: The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)

#215

Post by nradov »

rs999gti wrote: post #208
vibrio wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ The super high income (radiology) jobs people are alluding to here (500k-1m) are structured as partnerships that don’t offer employer contributions” Am I reading correctly that having no 401k match would be a concern for someone making $500k-$1m annually?

> super high income (radiology) jobs Weren't these replaced by outsourcing imaging reading to third world doctors?

Mostly no. Foreign doctors can't legally practice medicine on US patients. Those third-world doctors are mostly used for things like insurance case review. Some radiologists also perform interventional procedures, which requires being physically present (at least until teleoperated surgical robots become common).

Re: The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)

#216

Post by streptomycin »

cronix wrote: post #209
candiddevmike wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that places value seniority and experience so much more in medicine vs tech. Things change daily in both fields--new procedures, new findings--yet tech seems to have far more ageism. Why is an older doctor so much more valuable than an older developer?

I've heard of the "tech bro" stereotype (and seen it many times first hand), but struggle to recall a "doc bro" or equivalent one. I've also never heard of the term "culture fit" when discussing a potential hire in the medical industry like I do tech, software specifically. I wonder if the majority of the types of people who go into tech are different than the majority that go into medicine. > It's interesting that p…

Stereotypically, surgeons are the doc bros.

Re: The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)

#217

Post by algkkb »

hotpotamus wrote: post #189
trentnix wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've no doubt the stress of your work is immense and the constant threat of litigation (and the expense of the insurance to fight it) can be overwhelming. As a recipient of multiple eye surgeries (I had strabismus as a kid), I am grateful for competent professionals like you. But I think you buried the lede. In the 2010s I owned a high-end bicycle and sporting good store. It was 7 days of 10+ hours a day most weeks.…

> They were told they were building a castle, but instead they built a prison. The industry term is "golden handcuffs".

[flagged]

Re: The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)

#218

Post by chimeracoder »

trentnix wrote: post #188
the_d3f4ult wrote: post #62

Being a physician is a horrible career move right now. As a former Math/CS major turned eye surgeon, I can't help but think about how much easier my life would be had I stuck with tech. It's hard to understand exactly how hard the job is until you've lived it. I saw 40 patient's in clinic today in 8 hours without lunch or any kind of downtime and then spent 2 hours at the hospital because a patient needed an emergent…

I've no doubt the stress of your work is immense and the constant threat of litigation (and the expense of the insurance to fight it) can be overwhelming. As a recipient of multiple eye surgeries (I had strabismus as a kid), I am grateful for competent professionals like you. But I think you buried the lede. In the 2010s I owned a high-end bicycle and sporting good store. It was 7 days of 10+ hours a day most weeks.…

> But I think you buried the lede.

> In retrospect, I've concluded that the real problem they faced is they'd built a life dependent on a physician or surgeon's income. They were told they were building a castle, but instead they built a prison. The fact is, you just can't spend enough money to truly escape the stresses of your work, but you can certainly spend enough money to become shackled to it.

I don't know why you're making the leap in assuming that, just because you knew some physicians and surgeons who seemed to be inflating their lifestyle to match a high income, that OP is necessarily doing the same. There's no indication in their post of any of that.

Re: The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)

#219

Post by linsomniac »

A physician shortage is not a good thing, but I'm closer to the nurses shortage; my wife is a nurse. Nurses get it from all sides: The healthcare administrators never put enough on duty, similarly they don't have enough CNAs helping them, and the patients and families can be pretty abusive.

It's really a game of numbers: You should have 1 nurse for every X patients, and Y CNAs for every nurse. But the common story is that there are always games being played with increasing the number of patients and decreasing the number of CNAs, leaving nurses having to do more things for more patients. This directly, negatively impacts patient outcome.

Re: The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)

#220

Post by shadowofneptune »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #147

This is depressing. After recent medical scare that let me see the current level of medical treatment up close. I had though of leaving SWE to go into a medical field in order to help people. I'm in the US, and man, being in a hospital is really depressing, people are literally just dying for lack of help, being left behind. Or, maybe it's just more late stage capitalism, and I just happened to get a glimpse at how o…

If it's any help...

It has been a lot of shit, a lot of brutality, but it is changing. It is difficult to sustain such an environment forever. Most of the mega-laws that got passed in the last few decades, if they ever were, have become unenforceable with how overloaded public services are in the... are we still calling them red states, cultural South, etc?.

You have people in Indonesia, Argentina, US, etc. all talking to each other. Where there isn't formal education, informal education can actually take a decent place. The young across the world are more like each other than anyone would really admit. People who come to the US aren't really forced to learn the language to an unrealistic degree anymore, and that's good, really. The standards have been too high for a century.

Things are so overloaded because turns out people do still need a law system, a health system. It shows a self-respect people didn't have 10 years ago. I could go on but, there is still hope.

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