Would you do it again?

[yappy]

This is very true. The key is to either get into a state dental school (debt<200k) or do HPSP scholarship. If you're geographically flexible you can start practices that are on the cheaper side than what you would have to face in a dense city.

Look at how much dental school costs and starting incomes. Also look at the cost to buy a practice. Not all is as it seems. Entering dentistry 20 years ago would have been great because of low educational costs and low practice start-up costs. This is no longer true.

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[gutonc]

This is very true. The key is to either get into a state dental school (debt<200k) or do HPSP scholarship. If you're geographically flexible you can start practices that are on the cheaper side than what you would have to face in a dense city.

This is equally true with med school (with the obvious issue of residency).

Get somebody else to pay for med school (or go cheap at a state school)... do FM (where you will get paid and, with moonlighting can make $90-100k a year for the 3 years) ... join, buy or start a practice in the middle of f'n nowhere... profit.

 

[HIJay]

shouldn't this be the case anyway?

theoretically and ideally yes. and this is what everyone say on their med school app and belives in. heck me too!
but i realized that the passion for medicine has to be >>>> more than the BS and all the stuff i have listed above. It comes down are you willing to be bossed around by nurses and other people who you know less and way less than you and dictating what you can and cannot do for your patients?

if you love and passion supercedes above that, you will do fine as a physician practicing clinical medicine in US.

The "art" of medicine now, in my opinion has become a commodity and consumerism.
it is all about what the "customer" wants and not what the expert think they need. it is about marketing.

take it from this perspective, medicine is the only field where people get outrageous when you tell them "hey you have a $10 copay for this visit".
but if the same person goes to see a lawyer, and the lawyer tells them "hey you owe me $200 for that 1 hour consultation" they have no problem paying that.
this is because the patient population is so mis-conceived about healthcare.
We doctors need to feed our family too and have bills to pay too. we need to get paid for our services and time as well. patients dont get that notion, it is kind of irritating.

 

[HIJay]

HIJay.

Thank you for your candor. It seems there are some common complaints - I wonder how much better physicians would be if they no longer accepted insurances and went cash based, opened their own physician lead hospitals and medical centers, and hired their own nurses and MA's. More responsibility but a lot more autonomy.

see my above reply. majority of patients now dont even want to pay copay!

there are concierge medicine, catered to the rich and wealthy, but not everyone can do that. and rest of the population still needs a doc.

the whole system is messed up, from the patient to the doctors, to the government, insurance and pharm..
you cannot just reform one section and ignore the patient side and not educating them how the healthcare system is run in the USA.
i am willing to say that 99% of all patients have no idea how a doc gets paid or how little a doc gets reimbursed from medicare or other insurances, thus they all think docs are rich guys and thus should not be charging copay, as that would be "greedy"

 

[HIJay]

At what point in your training did you quit? What did you end up doing instead? I'm actually very interested in informatics.

i did 1 yr prelim surgery, wanted to continue in either gen surg or EM, but couldnt. so actually ended up at a cat IM program in community hosp.

never finished it obviously. actually within few months of starting my cat IM program, i made up my mind that as much as i love medicine and practicing medicine, i cannot stand certain aspects of it. and bottom line the bad outweighed the good for me. so i decided to quit.
it wasnt easy.

bio/medical informatic...think of it like IT in the computer world. it is taking all the data and information in bio/medical whether it be genomics, research data, quality reporting, etc and able to compile it and analyze in a way that can be presented and used in a useful constructive way.

it is an exciting field. too bad its a bit late for me.
technology + clinical medicine is the next big thing.

we need to let technology integrate with medicine.

for those older docs who refuse to change to EHR or whatever and want to stay on paper and pen and argue "its working for me. why change something when it is working or not broken"

if we stick with that arguement, we as a society will be in the stone ages still.
a famous line from the steve jobs biography is, and i am parapharsing..."if ford back in the early century asked his customers what do they want for a better and faster mode of transportation, all of them would have said give me a faster horse!"

 

[The Angriest Bird]

Yes, I would do it again, but I wouldn't be as aggressive as I was. I used to live in the camp called "my life is meaningless unless I become a doctor".

The truth is the definition of happiness is so multifactorial.

 

[DarthNeurology]

i would not do it again.
one of my reasons for quitting was that clinical medicine is one of the only field where you can do 4 yrs of premed, 4 yrs of med school and 3-7 yrs of residency, totaling of more than at least 10 yrs being the expert in the clinical medicine specialty of your choice and then having people who never touched a bio book before telling you how you can practice medicine and how much your knowledge and service deserves to be paid (politician, insurance, pharm, etc).

I would never dare to dream to tell my plumber, electrician, contractor how to do their job or how much their job deserved to be paid (tho yes I may try to haggle a bit). Or I would never try to dictate what a lawyer can and should do in a court setting or demanding how much they can charge. Medicine is the only field where the experts in the field have no autonomous power at all.

LOL! Only folks like super popular actors, popular authors, and other folks who derive their salary from entertainment focused professions can get away with super high salaries and making as much as the market will bear.

Physicians, just like teachers and mailmen, perform a necessary public service. Postal workers don't complain that because politicians have never delivered a letter they can't be allowed to dictate their salaries, though obviously some UPS workers make more than doctors.

If an electricians decided to charge you $15,000 for putting an outlet in your garage, would you be okay with that? Of course nobody would tell a family practice doc how to do their job if they had no medical training, but of course politicians aren't completely stupid, and just like you and your electrician, they haggle.

Just trying to point out the obvious as I don't find why some in the field believe that they would get autonomy when it comes to payments . . . has been controversial and will always be controversial. Though everybody has a boss, and when it comes to payments, the boss is combination of government and private entities.

 

[DarthNeurology]

but i realized that the passion for medicine has to be >>>> more than the BS and all the stuff i have listed above. It comes down are you willing to be bossed around by nurses and other people who you know less and way less than you and dictating what you can and cannot do for your patients?

if you love and passion supercedes above that, you will do fine as a physician practicing clinical medicine in US.

The "art" of medicine now, in my opinion has become a commodity and consumerism.

I think one issue here is that after four years of medical school, maybe four or more years of residency, you do know much more medicine than a nurse, or somebody with an MPHA . . . but the way the world works is that often times your "boss" will know less than you, and everybody thinks their boss is a *****. Yes, some newbies might be surprised that nurses are given a lot of equal footing, but nurses are professionals as well, real life isn't a soap opera where the doc orders everybody around without any questions from the staff.

The thing is that medicine is a commodity, has been ever since the middle ages and before that. A patient gets sick, they pay a healer to get better. To make into a mystical art form is overcomplicating what is really a professionalized business transaction.

Docs still get a lot of respect, I know, but it also breeds a sense of entitlement which can paradoxically lead to more complaints and feeling of being undervalued.

 

[DarthNeurology]

take it from this perspective, medicine is the only field where people get outrageous when you tell them "hey you have a $10 copay for this visit".
but if the same person goes to see a lawyer, and the lawyer tells them "hey you owe me $200 for that 1 hour consultation" they have no problem paying that.
this is because the patient population is so mis-conceived about healthcare.
We doctors need to feed our family too and have bills to pay too. we need to get paid for our services and time as well. patients dont get that notion, it is kind of irritating.

Actually, people do stiff lawyers all the time. This is why lawyers require an advance, the retainer fees. A lot of trial lawyers get a cut of any damages, if the client wins.

Even if patients knew how some docs fresh out of residency are struggling . . . it wouldn't stop a certain percentage of patients from complaining. Businessmen making millions of dollars a year will complain over $10 bucks, or even more, when a taxi cab driver doesn't get them to their destination on time.

Everybody loves to complain, and patients may complain more because they're dealing with their illness, or because they see doctors as being kind and concerned so they believe their complaints are being heard more in the doctor's office. Its just part of the job to deal with this, and its not a unique problem for doctors at all.

 

[DarthNeurology]

I'm curious to know if others out there would choose medicine again if they had the choice, given the recent changes in healthcare, the progressive encroachment by midlevels, etc?

Anyone out there think we are looking at a doctor-less healthcare system in the US, with midlevels progressively taking over more specialties-anesthesia, primary care, derm, etc?

This is kind of a trolling type question as folks who are disgruntled are more likely to shoot off a reply about how much they hate the field.

The most misleading and self-indulgent stuff I have ever read about medicine is the absolute drivel written on this message board by "disillusioned" interns/residents who, (while probably being clinically depressed and having a histrionic/neurotic personality disorder), complain like pretentious royalty about how medicine wasn't serving their needs.

Their needs.

Medicine is about getting an education and practical experience to help other people, if you are so upset about not having 'autonomy', and how you are treated, well, you're problems are very different from most everybody else in this country and you probably suffer from borderline personality disorder with narcissistic traits . . .

 

[DarthNeurology]

i did 1 yr prelim surgery, wanted to continue in either gen surg or EM, but couldnt. so actually ended up at a cat IM program in community hosp.

never finished it obviously. actually within few months of starting my cat IM program, i made up my mind that as much as i love medicine and practicing medicine, i cannot stand certain aspects of it. and bottom line the bad outweighed the good for me. so i decided to quit.
it wasnt easy.

it is an exciting field. too bad its a bit late for me.

Your life story means a lot to you, and you might suppose that because of this folks are taking a step back and questioning the meaning of medicine like you are (did) . . . while actually the folks who admitted you to medical school regret admitting you, the IM program regrets admitting you, and your place will be filled by somebody who can "stomach" doing the work.

Why write all of these posts so disparaging of the field you've left?

If you've left medicine for good, then it is time to stop wallowing in how "unfair" the world was to you during residency and move on to something else.

Sorry to be so blunt, but everything I said is true. It seems that although you have left medicine . . . you are still suffering emotionally in some shape or form. If you are still having such problems at your next job, then you should seek professional help.