amedstudent1

Under MD cons I wouldn’t necessarily put night shifts. More often than not the way nursing units are staffed is a shift based roster meaning you’ll be doing evening and nights for your whole career. Contrary to popular belief a lot of medical work is business hours with on call for after hours work. Depends on the speciality some are shift based (ED for instance) but in general the nurses do more night shifts than we do over their career.

I would have to disagree with the title of this submission. Rather I’d phrase it to you like this:

Healthcare is a team sport. There’s multiple well defined and some not so defined roles to fill. Some people are happy to take orders and just do what they’re told. Others want some autonomy but don’t wish to or want to care about anything other than their topic of interest. Yet others want of lurk in the background and assist after the main event is over. Etc. but you get the point. Where doctors come in is they’re usually either the one overseeing the ultimate care of the patient, or are called in as the subject matter expert in a certain field.

Or to sum it up crudely, you do medicine because you want to be the boss. You do nursing/PA because you want to work with a boss.

As an aside, the way our health system is structured in Australia makes NP quite unpopular. We don’t have PA here and NP operate under direct supervision. We have a decent proportion of them in rural areas (they basically keep the rural and smaller regional hospitals running) who earn doctor pay. But in our metropolitan areas only very few exist. Reasons I would guess is due to cost. They get paid above a junior doctor but you can assign more responsibility to a junior doctor and also abuse them more (you can’t pay an NP for 40 hours after working them 80 hours a week with no breaks).

Just to highlight what is already well known is a big downside of securing the “lifetime financial remuneration” is the sheer length of the training and juniper years. I’m not going to pretend that those in other careers don’t work hard (they do and reading some of the things on this website makes me feel I have it easy), however I can see why it’s not for everyone. The path in my country (Australia) is shorter than in America which at quickest is as follows 5 years medical school after finishing high school at 17/18. 2 years being a junior (average workweek is 50-60 hours which isn’t too bad). Then training for a specialist takes 5 years average workload is super variable anything from 40-80 hours a week. Then sometimes people do 1-2 years overseas to gain an edge on a certain area within their field. Then finally you come back as a boss (hopefully earning the big bucks at this time After securing a job in what can be a saturated market). Oh and don’t think about claiming overtime during this process, you get paid as if you worked 40 hours a week regardless. The above mentioned includes evenings public holidays night shifts etc.

It’s a long road and I can see why it would be hard if not impossible for others to carry through until the end depending on their age and life circumstances. I think once you consider not only the high income once you made it, but the long path (what I described above is streamlined assuming everything lines up perfectly and you outcompete your competition) it’s moderate to above average compensation at best. I contrast this to my friends in engineering and law whom have secured 6 figure salaries 1-2 years after graduating, have their weekends off and told me they haven’t studied since university. I do get the impression at least US software engineering may be the best way to secure a great income at a young age these days, hopefully it stays this way for you guys. Just wanted to stress don’t go into medicine for the long term financial remuneration because there’s likely something better for the work that you need to put in.

Irrespective if this question has any ulterior motives the answer is yes, definitely. It goes both ways, if you upset someone important there goes your chances in that speciality of medicine. On the flip side if your buddies with the important guys they can basically secure you a spot on a coveted program for instance. Medicine and it’s specialities are competitive to get into and there’s obviously way more demand than supply. So authority figures can pick and chose whom they want and also bad word spreads rapidly and you can be effectively blacklisted for messing with the wrong person. I’ve seen it a lot in my very young medical career. There’s some parts where it’s more of a factor and other parts where it’s less. I find it a fascinating topic actually but it’s one of those things that varies depending on many factors a big one being location/country.

I’m not who you asked your question to but I’ll put my opinion here for anyone interested: This website seems to be the place to read to be up to date in the tech and science sphere, which is similar to what I imagine lots of younger doctors and medical students are interested in. Me personally I love tech and read most articles except for the hardcore programming ones. A lot of discussion regarding medical science discoveries make it to the front page daily and it’s interesting to see what logically minded highly intelligent people outside medicine make of it. You’d be surprised a lot of medical colleagues I interact with aren’t the most tech savvy people and aren’t used to rapid iteration like the software engineering folks. That and entrepreneurship isn’t big in clinical practicing medicine so it’s an interesting aspect of life I know little about.

>Or just have low testosterone.

Huh? You're getting paid for it. The company isn't stupid, they wont let you use their resources just so you can take all the credit.

>Do people sit around and play video games, or do they create new things?

Surely I'm not the only one offended by this? Lost respect after reading this.

Interesting, one of the top tier schools in my area has a little trick: they give you a ring. The idea being you wear the ring to interviews, so that they know you're from the school. Of course, if they looked at your application form they would know your school, but for other areas where they cannot ask for your school this gets around that. I personally find that very elitest but people will go to lengths to make their reputation known (they ban wearing school uniforms, but rings are exempt for example_

Likewise, I identify with you on the main points. I liked maths as a schooler, did well in it. As did yourself, I had to memorise formulae for exam and was only allowed a 'basic' calculator. I have maths to thank for allowing me to get the necessary school marks to secure my further studies (which are unrelated to maths). But math's honestly just felt like imitating a machine or a robot. Completely mechanical, it just became a competition of making sure you could make the fewest mistakes in the upcoming exam versus your colleagues.

A majority of it is memorisation, which makes it both very easy in some respects, and hard in others. I still feel in the end it is a bit useless to learn it in the way we do now, seeing as computers can do it in a fraction of a second.

Your post is a gold mine of potential points to attack but I'll save it and just focus on this:

>the supply of doctors is kept short purposefully to ensure they make money++

No. It's costly to train them, and it's hard for an average person to afford.

Whilst on the whole I agree with you, the amount of doctors I know that would react (quite strongly) negatively to that is quite high, so anyone who takes your advice should be prepared. The most common response I've seen to your question was the doctor reminding the patient "there is always something called a second opinion", a couple of times though I noticed them taking the time to explain it.

That was the most succinct summary of the attitude i've seen many times amongst doctors. I'm saving that :D

It's always funny when someone thinks they're the center of attention... yes in a perfect world I'd remember everything and care only about you but if I do that I won't be finished my job. After a while I've noticed even as a student (and certainly picked up that a few doctors) that if you try care on a more personal level about every person, you'll be knocked down more and it'll be harder to function. Hence why I think a middle ground or even lack of care is what you see.

On the point of 2 radiologists checking, as a routine that would be too uneconomical, so if you wanted 2 people check you'd have to get a second opinion. Most likely on your own cash, since (as far as I am aware) everywhere medicine is in more demand than supply.

However you can be assured before an actual surgery, the same films will be reviewed by many doctors. Meaning that a mistake falling through everyone's mind is less likely.

I do agree with your point that sometimes a mistake can have a large impact on people. It's one of the challenges of medicine I'm not sure anyone has a solution to. On the flip side there would be many who are properly told the correct analysis, but i guess sometimes you get unlucky and a human error is made.

I think the other reply covers it a lot, but I find posts like yours to be very demeaning. You're essentially doing the same as someone who doesn't understand programming making declarations of how programs should be made. There is a lot going on behind the scenes and modern medicine is based on evidence, so please take the arm-chair commentary away