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Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal
131–140 of 170 posts
Re: Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal
#132My wife finished medical school a bit over 4 years ago. While she thought medical school was brutal, it was comparatively easy compared to the challenges she faced in residency (she did her prelim at UCLA-Harbor and is now at Boston Children's hospital doing pediatric neurology). 80+ hour work weeks are the norm, and sometimes she works 14 days straight and has a pager that beeps throughout the night that she must re…
Yep. Unfortunately, medical school is only the beginning.
Depending on your residency or fellowship program, it is not unusuall to sustain 80+ hours per week. And unlike nurses, you don't get to disconnect from work when you aren't in the hospital. There are pages to answer, notes to write, labs to review, and on and on...
The mental and emotional load is tremendous and there is no room for error. it's truly a miracle more people don't end up the subject of Morbidity and Mortality presentations from botched lines and pneumos.
Re: Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have noticed that it's become popular on HN to refer to parts of the healthcare industry as "rent seeking," and while I agree to some extent, I haven't seen much evidence that doctors or medical schools themselves are rent seeking. If we get a cold and need time off we need to visit a GP, this is rent seeking that could easily be handled by a non doctor for half the price. As for the other points, that's just a m…
>If we get a cold and need time off we need to visit a GP, this is rent seeking that could easily be handled by a non doctor for half the price. I'm not sure where you work, but I have never needed a doctor's note to get off work for a simple cold. That's a company policy issue, not the fault of the medical industry. As I said, a lot of the front-line work is now handled by NPs and PAs. There are still physicians in…
> I'm not sure where you work, but I have never needed a doctor's note to get off work for a simple cold.
Every single prescription or referral to a specialist is a doctor's note.
Re: Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal
#134medical school is humbling and difficult. Being a physician is difficult. I finished medical school in 1996 - didn't find it ridiculously hard, but then again, studying a lot was what I did in my youth. Now, I'm 47 years old, and work about 90 hours a week as a surgeon - I laugh when people say that we make too much. All I know is that 25 years ago, you had to be in the top 10% of your class to become a surgeon. When…
Can I ask if you're a surgeon in a private practice or hospital?
Re: Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. My wife is a neurosurgery resident. While she's on her research year right now, which is comparatively relaxed[1], prior to this she worked 5 years of 80+ hour weeks, including three stretches of 20+ consecutive days after another resident in her program left. Looking back on medical school, she can't believe how ridiculously easy it was and how much free time she had. [1] where "comparatively relaxed" still mea…
To what end? It's well known the body has Unless they get paid by the hour, I see no reason to continue to participate in such a system. Still, it should not be allowed when lives are at stake.
Well, look at it from the patients point of view... if there isn't a doctor to available, because they took some time off after a 20+ day stint...where does that leave you(the patient)? It's a tough job, but they signed up for it, and the pay is very good by comparison to other jobs that have similarly long hours.
For some contrast though, before everyone cries out "save the med students, they have it harder than any one should endure"... remember there are other jobs with far greater risks, hours, and far less pay. Ever been deployed in a military unit during wartime? I've wished there was a window to jump out of several times, or that a pager beeping was the scariest thing to fear while trying to sleep - and that was in recent engagements, it was far worse for the generation before us during wartime - doctors not so much.
Re: Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal
#136My wife finished medical school a bit over 4 years ago. While she thought medical school was brutal, it was comparatively easy compared to the challenges she faced in residency (she did her prelim at UCLA-Harbor and is now at Boston Children's hospital doing pediatric neurology). 80+ hour work weeks are the norm, and sometimes she works 14 days straight and has a pager that beeps throughout the night that she must re…
As a father whose young son had a compound fracture recently and had to wait in the ER for 3 hours to get it patched up by a grumpy, rushed, and tired ortho, this is horrifying. Something really needs to be done about current crony capitalistic US medical industry.
The solution might just be to expand or establish more medical schools, and graduate more doctors.
If there were twice as many doctors, the existing doctors probably wouldn't need to work 80 hours a week, and could likely cut down to 40 hours.
The other problem might be that doctors are paid extremely well in the U.S. compared to the rest of the world, and even compared to other rich first-world countries.
Re: Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its difficult to explain to lay people (and I in all honesty do not mean to be condescending) but even in the "simplest" of cases a doctor is called upon to draw on advanced skills and concepts he may not even remember he has. People fail out of the profession at various levels. A classmate of mine fled in the second year during her first dissection of a cadavar, never to return, some make it to residncy then quit. C…
> but even in the "simplest" of cases a doctor is called upon to draw on advanced skills and concepts he may not even remember he has. But how often does that occur? And is it worth the economic cost of not having doctors available, or doctors overworked? Individual human life is cheap. >A doctor is either capable or he/she is not. We simply cant train them halfway. There are countries that have carried out the exper…
> But how often does that occur? And is it worth the economic cost of not having doctors available, or doctors overworked? Individual human life is cheap.
As someone currently in medical school, I'm going to have to agree w/ the previous comment that often "simple" cases are not so simple. For dealing with something as simple as diarrhea, you have to understand the anatomy of the GI tract, the physiology of nutrient absorption, pathophysiology of different diseases, important details about infectious causes (i.e. toxins, mech of transmission, etc.), labs, clinical presentation, associated phys/pathophys like neurological, immunological, and hematological features, associated symptoms, common patient histories, drugs and their mechanisms of actions, etc. etc. etc. The sheer volume of knowledge that you need to know and how everything fits together is something I hadn't realized before coming to med school. Plus, you have to learn clinical skills like how to take a patient history, do a physical exam, etc. all of which is only for treatment of diarrhea. Now imagine learning all of this for topics as wide ranging as all the different cancers, heart failure, emphysema, diabetes, all the different congenital defects, etc. You also have to know how to read radiology, how to intubate, draw blood, perform disease-specific tests, maybe learn how to do surgery, etc. Anyway, the point is it takes a lot of skills and concepts for a fully trained doctor to work up simple things.
Re: Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal
#138medical school is humbling and difficult. Being a physician is difficult. I finished medical school in 1996 - didn't find it ridiculously hard, but then again, studying a lot was what I did in my youth. Now, I'm 47 years old, and work about 90 hours a week as a surgeon - I laugh when people say that we make too much. All I know is that 25 years ago, you had to be in the top 10% of your class to become a surgeon. When…
Do you really work 90 hours? That's 13 hours a day 7 days a week. How does that even work logistically when you need to eat, sleep, commute, do laundry, shop for food, and hopefully also see family or friends on occasion.
My wife is a neurosurgeon in residency and she absolutely works 90-~110 hours just about every week. She barely sleeps and eats one or two big meals a day (almost always ordered from Seamless), we have to live within a couple blocks of the hospital, and I just don't see how she would survive on her own if I wasn't around as far as food/laundry/etc.. is concerned -- I think that answers all of your questions.
Re: Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
To what end? It's well known the body has Unless they get paid by the hour, I see no reason to continue to participate in such a system. Still, it should not be allowed when lives are at stake.
Well, look at it from the patients point of view... if there isn't a doctor to available, because they took some time off after a 20+ day stint...where does that leave you(the patient)? It's a tough job, but they signed up for it, and the pay is very good by comparison to other jobs that have similarly long hours. For some contrast though, before everyone cries out "save the med students, they have it harder than any…
> the pay is very good by comparison to other jobs that have similarly long hours.
Once you're an attending, yes. My wife, however, is still a resident. She's doing this for $50k/year.
Re: Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. My wife is a neurosurgery resident. While she's on her research year right now, which is comparatively relaxed[1], prior to this she worked 5 years of 80+ hour weeks, including three stretches of 20+ consecutive days after another resident in her program left. Looking back on medical school, she can't believe how ridiculously easy it was and how much free time she had. [1] where "comparatively relaxed" still mea…
To what end? It's well known the body has Unless they get paid by the hour, I see no reason to continue to participate in such a system. Still, it should not be allowed when lives are at stake.
There's no other path to becoming a doctor in the US. You can choose to go into a specialty with more relaxed hours, but you need to go through residency no matter what. If you want to be a doctor, you put up with it, like the generations before you. A sufficient number of residents organizing could do something about it, but (a) no one has time to organize when they're working 90 hour weeks and (b) there's a significant Stockholm syndrome effect in play.
It's worth noting that there have been several studies over the years investigating whether reduced hours produce better outcomes; they don't seem to. Shorter hours means more shift changes and patient handoffs, which is the source of more errors than tired residents. Also, keep in made that getting the same experience in a specialized field like neurosurgery with fewer hours per week would require extending the training program even further. It's already seven years beyond medical school, often with a one year fellowship after residency. Extending it another few years isn't really a viable option unless we significantly increase the autonomy and salary that residents receive.