See, I think what a lot of medical students, residents, and physicians that post here are trying to get across is that you're not going to like being a medical student, resident, or even a doctor. Not in the sense that the starving artist likes his job, anyway. Medical school is 2 years of mind numbing fact memorization (ever tried to memorize the dictionary) followed by 2 years of sleeplessness, kiss-assery, and scut. Residency is 3-9 years of abuse and even less sleep. As a physician things will get better, but your work hours will still involve the threats of litigation and infection, an assembly line 15 minute/patient pace, a complete lack of origional creative thought, and of course the kind of truely visceral reaction you get from both seeing and smelling vomit and pus under flourescent lights day after day.
That's the difference between the medical student and the starving artist, that's the reason that you need to spend to much money to attract talented people to this field: because no one actually enjoys medicine. It's not that it's a bad job as jobs go. Once you get past the training the hours can be alright, the job security is great, and pay is good. However, like working on an assembly line, it is something that almost everyone does 100% to improve the quality of their time when they're NOT at work. If they take that away, and this job gets less lucrative, then there's really no reason for anyone with talent to go into this career.
Just my opinion, could be wrong.
