Correct, but most people are somewhere in the middle. To have absolutely no call (even outpatient docs take call for the practice) would require someone else to cover all your your patients off-hours, all days/weeks for the year, every year. Not bloody likely. It doesn't have to mean going into the hospital and seeing consults/admitting patients (although in some cases it does).
I'm an intensivist and acute stroke physician, which means when I am on, I am near the phone/computer and ready to come back to work at a moment's notice (when I'm not still at work). I get FYI calls and pages and issues run by me all hours of the day and night. That's a pretty rough call. But there are literally hundreds of days each year when that is not the case, when I can work from home, go to conferences, write papers, have lab meetings, write grants, write more grants, and write more grants again. Is that so bad?
One person's call can be very different from another. There are plenty of docs in my department who don't have an answering service, so they're on 24 hours a day, every day of the year unless they specifically sign their practice out to their colleagues. Is that bad? If you have a low patient volume, that might not be a big deal. But in a 10 physician outpatient pain and headache practice, a night on call could be pretty darn miserable even if all you're doing is covering the outpatient calls from the answering service. You need to consider the differences between outpatient, admitting in community vs. regional vs. academic centers, hospitalist/ICU, and stroke calls before you decide what you like and what you don't.
