This reminds me of my own life and the lives of MD/PhDs I see in Radiology.
On the PhD side you get to hear--You're not a real PhD. You're a medical student. Why are you wasting your time? You'll just be doing clinical research or private practice anyways. You need 100% of your time to do real research. Who would want a doctor who only spends some of their time in the clinics? Then why the heck do a MD/PhD other than to get a job? What a waste of time.
BTW, be very careful not to make us feel like you are in any way saying that MDs will make more money or have better job prospects than PhDs. You'd have to be crazy to turn down all the ridiculous MD money we perceive you to make someday regardless what you end up doing, and we're all nervous about getting funding/a job in our own lives so don't mention anything about future job prospects on either side. If we think you are saying in any way that MDs are better than PhDs, we will crucify you.
On the MD side you get to hear--You make life difficult for everyone else because you don't pull your weight as a clinician. In fact, you aren't even a real clinician. We spend 100% of our times being clinicians, so 20% of your time won't cut it. Maybe we'll give you a little time for research. We won't give you startup funding or resources. In fact, we'll eat into all that protected time we promised you. Don't complain about it, because you're messing up everyone's schedules. You researchers are such blood suckers, eating into our department bonus to try to get resources to do your experiments to try to bring in that shrinking grant money. Then, when you aren't successful doing research (we never expected you to be), you can generate lots of revenue like you should have been to begin with.
BTW, if we think you are saying in any way that PhDs are better than MDs, we will crucify you.
I guess the only way to please everyone is to train at 110% as a medical student and train 110% as a researcher and by the time you're done putting in your 220% through medical school, PhD, and residency, if you're not burned out you can have no hair, a divorce, and some kids you never see. Or you can just take it easy, but then you'll never get your MD/PhD and everyone's going to hate you because you're good at nothing. Then when it's time to find a job you can put in 200% of full-time so you can do both!
I just to know wanted you to know what you're getting into there op
I'm convinced at this point it's fine to get both degrees but it seems to me like you should never tell anyone you have or are working on both except your boss. I'm not nearly this cynical however. You do have to expect that everyone's egos are high and people are going to pee on you along the way--i.e. Obdeli's post which had nothing to do with your question and instead tried to discourage you. Why even say "Don't do it, just to get in" if you're not assuming it of the op? What sillyness IMO. He never said he was. Of all the things to bring up out of the blue...
Of course it's not always like this of course and you have to have some faith that what you're doing is worthwhile, you just can't please everyone all the time.
Fortunately, when it comes to residency you pretty much never hear of MD/PhDs not matching. I've seen the AOA, high board scores, many publications who didn't do anything related to imaging match at top places and then I've seen an MD/PhD who was low in his class with low board scores and no first author pubs in his PhD match okay. The programs that don't want us have nothing to offer us. The academic programs that do pick MD/PhDs are the places we want to be at. Unfortunately, some stress is caused because they're the same places that everyone else seems to want to be at, but the 3 MD/PhDs who matched from my program this year seem to think you'll be just fine.
