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Why you should not go to medical school

blogs.law.harvard.edu

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Re: Why you should not go to medical school

#141

Post by roentgen »

mynameishere wrote: post #126
giardini wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The median salary for experienced radiologists is $300k-400k. And increasingly radiology has been outsourced overseas with mostly technicians required stateside (scan during the day, radiologist in India examines at night, results available the next morning). But roentgen claims to be a businessman as well as a radiologist. If so, most of his income would be from several radiology businesses. In that case the 800k/ye…

http://www1.salary.com/radiologist-Salary.html http://www1.salary.com/Physician-Cardiology-Non-Invasive-Sal... http://www1.salary.com/neurologist-Salary.html That radiologists make 100K more than cardiologists and 200k (!!!) more than neurologists absolutely screams market manipulation. Radiology seems literally one generation of Intel processors away from being automated into oblivion. God speed that it is.

I'm not sure if you've ever seen a CT stroke study, which typically includes 4,000 images. If you think a computer can accurately interpret one of these any time soon, I would say you are poorly informed.

See my response below, and look into "CAD" and mammography.

Re: Why you should not go to medical school

#142

Post by roentgen »

Game_Ender wrote: post #123
roentgen wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. I'm very good at my job, and I worked very hard to get where I am. Sick people should be happy that I'm reading their CT scans. If the pay wasn't good I would have chosen a different field, and somebody else would be doing my job, less well. For reference, before medical school I worked in IT, and at the age of 23 ( 15 years ago ) I was making six figures. I left that to go back to school, partly because…

Do you worry about being replaced by computer software? You said you make $800k a year, and for that amount of money you could higher 2-3 PhDs in machine learning and computer vision for each radiologist. Do that maybe 5 times over and give them 5-10 years and productivity and costs for CT scan analysis will probably go way down. After all a radiologist armed with software that prescans each CT scan looking for inter…

I've sort of answered this problem above. I happen to think the problem is not solvable any time soon. If you or someone you know would like to prove me wrong, I will invest in your venture.

Re: Why you should not go to medical school

#143

Post by carbocation »

roentgen wrote: post #140
carbocation wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be quite interested to see evidence to support this assertion. Or is it just generally the case that everyone sees Osler's days as medicine's primetime, with a long slide since then?

I don't have any hard evidence, but I insist that it is true. Bright and determined baby-boomers became doctors and lawyers and accountants. Today smart and determined people aren't even going to college. The HN demographic is a perfect example of this.

Intuitively, I think I get a different sense of the HN demographic. It's one thing to say that the brightest aren't going to medical school. It's another thing to say that the best and brightest aren't even going to college.

I might argue that going to college is no longer necessary for the purpose of learning, because the material is so widely available. Even though I think that's true (for some fields), I still wouldn't advise people not to go to college because of the signaling problem (which one then has to sidestep by starting their own business or by contributing impressively in open source, etc).

I get hyperbole for the purpose of making a point, but if you go too far, you come off sounding a bit incredible.

Re: Why you should not go to medical school

#144

Post by djacobs »

Well said.

After four years of gearing up to go to medical school, I dropped that goal and went into software engineering. I wrote about this choice pretty extensively, as it was not an excruciating decision [0]. In spite of how much I really wanted med school, I also wanted a life. I tried to maintain a life while applying to med school, full of all the hobbies that make my life fun, but balancing those two wasn't actually possible. So I chose to reclaim my life.

Reading this piece is refreshing--I haven't seen enough people talk about the trade-offs of a physician. A lot of people in software think "I would have a meaningful life if I were in medicine"--and they probably have the smarts to be in medicine--but I think we should combat the idea that moving in that direction makes for a life that's any more fulfilling than engineering.

[0]: http://wit.io/posts/pivot-my-journey-from-medicine-into-tech...

Re: Why you should not go to medical school

#145

Post by verisimilitude »

roentgen wrote: post #138
larrys wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't down vote it but I suspect that it's "Medical school was easy" "went out drinking" "partying two or three nights a week" "did well with the ladies" "get by on four hours of sleep" "nurses were much more responsive to my advances" "busy but always had time for each other" "make over 800k a year". "ultimate job security" "tremendous resource for my family" "easy to get screwed by the medical system...won't hap…

Sorry, but I wanted to be completely honest. There were a few guys like me in my medical school. There needs to be a counterpoint to the doom and gloom reports of "no life" and "living hell".

Thank you. However, statistical outliers (you) don't make strong counterpoints.

Re: Why you should not go to medical school

#146

Post by kingkawn »

I started the med school track late in life (27 when I started taking premed classes), and while I haven't finished, I have to say that all of the complaining I hear from fellow students and doctors is ridiculous. All careers take up lots of your life. All careers end up dominating your social circles. All careers leave you feeling underpaid, including the people I know in finance who makes tons of money and work 12 hours a day 7 days a week minimum. Life is hard. I'm glad I took a lot of my 20's to experience that in other ways, so now that I've come to the medicine path, it really feels great. I agree that the decision to do this is not one that an 18 year old starting undergrad should make. But nonetheless, medicine is no worse than anything else.

Re: Why you should not go to medical school

#147

Post by hackinthebochs »

kenjackson wrote: post #91
sp332 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really, really don't think that's true. Most people are not able to do this, and most of those few who could don't want to put themselves through it. And then separately, how many people would trust a self-taught diagnostician?

Most people are not able to do this, and most of those few who could don't want to put themselves through it. Most people don't have to be able to do it, just more than are allowed to do it now, but a factor of say 10. Furthermore, I don't think people would necessarily need to go through med school and residency. It's like building a website. There's probably some parallel universe where programming requires certifi…

Instead of writing out a long response, I'll just point out that to compare building websites with diagnosing life-threatening illness many times a day is pretty ridiculous.

Of course you don't need to have gone to MIT, etc to build a website. The room for error is just many many orders of magnitude different between that and radiology. There's a reason you don't generally hire self taught code monkeys to build software with real-time or life-ensuring requirements.

Re: Why you should not go to medical school

#148

Post by Locke1689 »

roentgen wrote: post #141
mynameishere wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www1.salary.com/radiologist-Salary.html http://www1.salary.com/Physician-Cardiology-Non-Invasive-Sal... http://www1.salary.com/neurologist-Salary.html That radiologists make 100K more than cardiologists and 200k (!!!) more than neurologists absolutely screams market manipulation. Radiology seems literally one generation of Intel processors away from being automated into oblivion. God speed that it is.

I'm not sure if you've ever seen a CT stroke study, which typically includes 4,000 images. If you think a computer can accurately interpret one of these any time soon, I would say you are poorly informed. See my response below, and look into "CAD" and mammography.

Hmm, how exactly does the number of images affect predictive algorithms? If anything, more data is better. No offense, but as a radiologist you're not exactly familiar with the state of the art in A.I. image processing. I'd say that both of us are unqualified to state the degree of effectiveness of computational geometry and computer vision in radiology.

Re: Why you should not go to medical school

#149

Post by DTrejo »

kingkawn wrote: post #146

I started the med school track late in life (27 when I started taking premed classes), and while I haven't finished, I have to say that all of the complaining I hear from fellow students and doctors is ridiculous. All careers take up lots of your life. All careers end up dominating your social circles. All careers leave you feeling underpaid, including the people I know in finance who makes tons of money and work 12…

Did you read the article?

Re: Why you should not go to medical school

#150

Post by mahyarm »

gonehome wrote: post #102
mahyarm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ironic that it doesn't have to be this way at all. It's counter productive other than it makes someone richer. Doctors want to keep their high prices with artificial barriers such as these and the glamor keeps the supply relatively high.

The long hours and over working is more a factor of a hospital trying to save money than having anything to do with supposed 'price controls' being purposefully set up by doctors. The price comes mostly as a factor of the extremely expensive education (both in cost and time) that is necessary. If you want talented people in any field, especially one with such a laboring path of entry, you have to pay them well.

If the kids had choices, they would not choose hospitals where shifts are 40 hours long and only sleep of 6 hours out of those 40 every thing else being equal. They don't, because of the power that the hospitals have over residents in granting their licence and the cultural ubiquity in practice.

Similarly, there are very limited spaces to enter medical school and it's extremely difficult to enter. How many new orthodontists are trained in a year? Under a 100? In a country of 300 million people? On top of that, medical school is very expensive. On top of that, you have to go to university for 3-4 years before you can even enter med school.

Imagine if engineering degrees were like that, because they could of been. Similarly with accounting or finance. Maybe they're not because the math heavy nature is enough of a barrier, even the simple math of accounting. American medical schools (and doctor associations) could choose to structure their curriculums to be similar to an engineering degree, admit high school students and make the education be 5-6 years long, teach in the summer, whatever. I'm fairly sure the UK does that, and I'm not sure if they haze their residents too with 40 hour shifts. They can also release the spigot, hire more teachers and teach more students to increase the supply of doctors. The increased supply of doctors will lead in a decrease of overall doctor wages and decrease health care costs. That along with an FDA drug approval process that doesn't cost 200 million and more clearly defined and easy to avoid malpractice rules (as in it's not easy to commit malpractice by mistake) would lead to huge systemic decreases in US health care costs alone.

Don't tell me it's about wanting the best, because treating people with sleep deprived residents is negligent. That is no where near the best care for any sort of patient. The best will just walk away once they know that they can make more money doing less work in i-banking, tech, petroleum, engineering, or business in far nicer environments, and they do by droves.

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