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Are Physicians Being Squeezed?
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Getting a little greedy aren't we?
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Maceo had it worst than I did, of course. However, you can and I did q3 call similar to what he describes and still went under the 80 hour. All you have to do is (and I did) call every three days for three weeks and then a week of "night float" where you only work ten hours a night for five days. The rules say you can only work 80 hours a week averaged over four weeks. This means that you can work over 80 hours in any given week.
Four months of three week blocks of q3 call and then a week of "night float" will still wear you down.
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Word. Medicine will not, repeat not, love you back and the patients who are so not worth it won't either. Therefore money is an important part of the whole package. This job would suck for $20.00 an hour. Hell, it sucks for the $12.50 an hour I am making as a resident.
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Sigh...you miss everyone's point. When you work hard and sacrifice for over 12 years, you deserve to be financially compensated. It's not about being happy, it's about market value. You need to realize that as a physician you have worth. This isn't like the Starbuck's job you had in college where they could pull almost anyone off the street and plug them in. It takes massive amounts of money and time to train competent physicians.
When you have *****s who say, "ya I'll work for 60 grand a year", you are effectively lowering everyone else's market value as a physician. You are basically saying, hey, even though I gave up 12 years of my life to train, I shouldn't be rewarded for it....my skills are worth the same as a teacher, a nurse, a cop, or someone else who doesn't have the same skill set.
How long does it take to train a new teacher? 4 years of a college degree. A cop? A year or two. How about a nurse? 4 years for an RN
What about a physician? 8 years of school plus 3 years of training....if you think that you are worth the same as other professions, you are a *****. Do us all a favor and stay out of medicine. It's not about what you think you can live with, it's about what is fair.
And for the record, I don't think too many of us here are disgruntled. I have definitely enjoyed medical school so far, but I'm not dumb. Do I want to help people? Of course. But I don't see why I have to settle for anything less than my market value (whatever that may be in the future).
Again...I don't see why some of you think being a doctor and making money have to be exclusive from one another. I have no idea where pre-meds got the idea that it's taboo to make money as a doctor. If you have a rare skill, then you should be compensated for it.
Really, like what? Faster ways, maybe...easier? Debatable.
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I do wonder, what is the actual value of a physician? What is "fair" compensation? Surely it could be estimated what a physician's worth is.
For instance, what are some of the more difficult but economically valuable college majors? There's mechanical and electrical engineer, geology, computer engineering, and finance.
While those majors don't require quite the same skills that a physician uses, I think one could argue that if one has the ability to earn acceptance and pass medical school, one has the ability to finish a difficult major like in engineering or a modestly difficult one like finance.
So, if one were looking at 'fairness'...a hypothetical student with the talent to do either field should be paid about the same in the long run whether they save lives directly or save lives by building safe bridges. That's my working assumption, at least.
Ok, so say those majors pay on average $70,000 a year over the 5 year period following graduation. I'm just trying to come up with a rough estimate here, bear with me.
So if someone does medical school instead, they need to be paid $70,000 a per year of 50 hour a week work after compensating for
1. 4 years medical school tuition
2. Average residency length of ~4 years
3. Opportunity cost of ~8 years training
4. A premium on the value of labor performed under life/death stress
5. The value of working for 80 hours a week for ~4 years during residency followed by 60-70 hours/week as an attending
It's somewhat a complex calculation to make, as the net present value of a physican's higher pay in the future needs to be compared to the value of going to work right out of undergrad.
Basically, I'm not saying whatever number we could up with should be what physicians are paid, but it would be interesting to find out if $160k or whatever the average is is actually a decent salary or not, given all the demands of becoming a doctor.
For instance, what are some of the more difficult but economically valuable college majors? There's mechanical and electrical engineer, geology, computer engineering, and finance.
While those majors don't require quite the same skills that a physician uses, I think one could argue that if one has the ability to earn acceptance and pass medical school, one has the ability to finish a difficult major like in engineering or a modestly difficult one like finance.
So, if one were looking at 'fairness'...a hypothetical student with the talent to do either field should be paid about the same in the long run whether they save lives directly or save lives by building safe bridges. That's my working assumption, at least.
Ok, so say those majors pay on average $70,000 a year over the 5 year period following graduation. I'm just trying to come up with a rough estimate here, bear with me.
So if someone does medical school instead, they need to be paid $70,000 a per year of 50 hour a week work after compensating for
1. 4 years medical school tuition
2. Average residency length of ~4 years
3. Opportunity cost of ~8 years training
4. A premium on the value of labor performed under life/death stress
5. The value of working for 80 hours a week for ~4 years during residency followed by 60-70 hours/week as an attending
It's somewhat a complex calculation to make, as the net present value of a physican's higher pay in the future needs to be compared to the value of going to work right out of undergrad.
Basically, I'm not saying whatever number we could up with should be what physicians are paid, but it would be interesting to find out if $160k or whatever the average is is actually a decent salary or not, given all the demands of becoming a doctor.
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This is incredibly ironic, because really you're missing everyone else's point.
No one in this thread (IIRC) is saying anything about how making money is bad, or even that physicians don't deserve to be compensated adequately. What people are saying is: I value personal satisfaction in a job highly, and to me personal satisfaction has high worth to me in a career I am considering.
Saying "I would be willing to work for So-and-so much" doesn't mean "My job is only worth me being paid So-and-so much." Rather, it means "I would be willing to work for a reduced compensation provided I could be in an environment where I felt fulfilled and accomplished."
That statement is entirely different from the claim that "My rare and valuable skills do not have worth."
Anyhow, all of this is completely besides the point which is that you can't rationally criticize anyone for making their own personal value judgment on what something is worth to themselves because it's just that -- a personal value judgment.
In any case, the world could use more idealism, not less. Being jaded is very, very overrated.
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> 50% means "more than likely", and the figure is > 50%, not the 45% you are getting. The discussion with figures is someplace on SDN. BLS is excluding something(s) that others in the industry categorize as primary care -- I'm not sure what off the top of my head, but this exact discussion was on SDN a few months back if you want to look for it and the statistic was slightly above 50%. Not sure it is a critical point at any rate -- we are only talking about a couple of percent, and actually more and more US allo students are getting pushed down into primary care slots this past year and the next few to come by virtue of the fact that more med school seats opened up than residency slots. At any rate the average income of primary care is below the national average for physicians (even including OB). Which puts it below 160k. You are more likely to earn below average if you go into primary care, and above average if you end up in a competitive specialty. So going into med school it's probably smartest to just assume the average because you don't know yet where you are going to be compared to your peers, competitively speaking.
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It's not about saying what med schools want to hear. It's common sense, for two reasons. (1) You are going into a field where you have some of the longest schooling and training, have the highest tuition debt, and will be working pretty extreme hours during residency. The time value of money looms large -- $100 earned today is worth a whole lot more than $100 earned a decade from now. It's the first rule of finance, and why all the MBA's have fancy calculators with Net Present Value buttons. Delayed earnings is worth a lot less than face value. Most other fields will get you out and earning disposable income a lot earlier. It may be lower face value, but if you get it sooner it may well be worth more. (2) There is more of a ceiling on income in medicine. In the business world, there is no upper limit to income -- a lot is dictated by investments, the economy, marketing skills, other talents. Medicine is fairly regimented, and earnings are largely dictated by reimbursements from the insurance industry, and so it's a rarity for someone to earn substantially more than the norm or outside of a very fixed range. There are advantages, because while there is a ceiling, there is also generally a floor in medicine. So you have job security and generally will earn some comfortable level of income. But the price you pay for this security is the upper limit. It's a good example of the risk vs reward balance.
If you go into med school you will see some former college classmates driving around in sports cars while you are toiling in residency. The smaller percentage of folks who come out of college and law school into decent jobs will start earning decent money long before you, and while your face value income may be greater in another decade, again, money later isn't worth as much. Most importantly, you will very likely miss the next economic boom in a few years because while you are taking out huge student loans, some non-physician friends will be able to squirrel away similar amounts of savings to invest.
So no, it's not about saying what med schools want to hear, or about some focus on altruism. People say it's a bad path to take for money because that's a fact. The folks who get really rich aren't usually doctors. If you want to maximize wealth this isn't the right path. If you are willing to work very long hours and experience very delayed gratification for a comfortable (but hardly maximized) income, then that's usually what medicine can provide. But only a financially naive person would think that this is one of the better paths for the money. This topic has been done to death on SDN, and sadly people keep coming onto pre-allo with wrong concepts of wealth maximization. The further out you have the wait for a payday the worse the investment is. Period. And when you top it off with having to borrow a quarter mill in the process, it's foolhardy. And then having to work 80 hour work weeks along the path to boot...
So they don't want to hear this because it's the party line. They want to hear it because it's the only logical conclusion a bright person with any financial common sense can come to, and they'd like to think they are recruiting bright people. If you want money, you take one of the riskier, shorter paths where money is the emphasis. If you take medicine, you have less risk, but it's such a long and expensive and ceiling heavy path that you will never maximize your wealth and are expected to understand this.
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You have to understand, almost every resident is at or approaching middle age, tired and broke, with a six figure monkey dancing on his/her back, and uncertainty regarding future compensation and employment trends. When someone dances through and says "I'd do it for 60K!" it's just pretty damned annoying.
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You are lucky - your student debt level sounds fairly low, your interest rate is low, and you are going into a well paid specialty. Consolidating at a low interest rate is not possible anymore, and the amounts of debt that people are taking on today is considerably higher than it was for you and your peers 8+ years ago, certainly far higher than it was 15+ years. Sure, $500 a month will be a snap for you (it would be a snap for everyone), but there are lots of folks on SDN who are going deep into debt for med school and are facing monthlies of $3k+ which is in a whole 'nother universe of pain.
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Maybe you should go look at the title of the thread again....it says something about physicians being squeezed; it's not "lets talk about personal job satisfaction thread"...try working on that reading comprehension. I understand what people are saying...they think that they love medicine so much, that they would do it for a reduced pay. That is the the type of attitude that bothers me. A thread that started out about physician's pay got a bunch of idealists to say that they would do this job for less money.
That's all fine and well, but every other profession out there (including other health care providers such as nurses) fights vehemently for their compensation. I don't see why physicians can't do the same. I'm not arguing against idealism, but I'm arguing against the attitude that it's taboo for a physician to be interested in their own financial future.
Again, you're talking about job satisfaction. What exactly does job satisfaction have to do with your pay? Are you trying to imply that since you are satisfied with your job, that you are willing to take less pay? I am arguing against that attitude. I want a job that will be both self satisfying and financially lucrative. I see nothing wrong with that.
Yes it does. That is exactly what it means. By taking less money, you are devauling yourself and in the process, others in your same field. I could care less what you do as an individual, but it is the attitude that physicians shouldn't care about money that is a partial factor in driving down pay.
I'm pretty sure if every physician said, "Hey, my skills are worth X amount of dollars, and I'm not going to take less" then they wouldn't be "squeezed" as the title of this post suggests. But that won't work if there are some nut jobs who will do the same job for pennies on the dollar.
Let me put it another way...when your employer says, I need you to take a paycut, and your general attitude is "Hey, it's ok, I love this and I would do it for less anyway!", how much do you think that employer is going to take from you? He's going to take as much as you allow him to. Not only that, then your employer is going to go to your other co-workers and say "Evergray is doing the same job as you guys for less pay, so since he is ok with it, the rest of you should be too!"
Wow. That was a very long rant to state that medicine isn't the fastest way to make money. Thank you Captian Obvious.
I never said medicine was about obtaining wealth. I said it was about fair compensation. Not once did I talk about wealth or "getting rich." Just like you, I feel that future physicians should be very aware of the future climate surrounding medicine and pay. Instead of bending over and taking it though, physicians should take a stand and say "I'm not going to get squeezed"
About what med schools want to hear...I can't tell you how many interviews I've done where every applicant tells me about how they just want to help people, and how the big problem in medicine is that we don't have many primary care docs, and that they are totally planning to go into a lower paying speciality.....give me a freaking break. Everyone says this crap, and very few actually mean it. Every school out there preaches about the holy grail of primary care...don't act like this is some phenomenom that is just made up.
Want proof? What are the most competitive specialities? I'll give you a hint....it ain't primary care.
Now I wonder....what do the most competitive specialities have in common???
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Even if it is true that it is slightly above 50%, it is only slightly. People constantly say you are going to end up in primary care as if it takes a miracle to avoid it. Also, the 160k is the average salary for IM according the BLS (actually $166k to be exact for those with more than one year of experience), not for pysicians as a whole.
The only specialties who make less than that are pediatrics (161k) and family practice (156k). If you include psych and obgyn, like I said previously the average of the median salaries across primary care + psych is $172k. That is not for ALL physicians, just the lowest earning specialties. In any case somehow you are confusing the natl average for ALL physicians with the natl average for IM (~165k). That or you are using some data I'm not aware of, but what I'm saying is fully in line with the BLS.
As far as excluding something others category as primary care... I don't think it should be so difficult for us to think of all the medical specialties and figure out what that is. From what I can see nothing is missing. Even if a specialty is missing it is likely to have a median salary above pediatrics/IM. If thats true it would push the percentage in "primary care" up but also the average salary (which is what happened when you insisted including psych).
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I actually will be paying close to $40,000 per year for the next eight years to service my debt as I had to take out some private loans, my circumstances being vastly different than most. Just a cost of doing business, at least until all the *****s on SDN drive compensation down to that wonderful "high five figures."
But look, people who make less than doctors routinely buy houses for much more than the average medical school debt and pay much more per month for long periods of time and think it a good investment.
$3000 per month is not a 'nother universe of pain if you gross $25,000 per month. Even if you only make $150,000 per year you'll still net more than $60,000 per year which is apparently the new "acceptable" salary on SDN; a figure that I have seen drop over the years from $250,000 to $110,000 and now to its current value as we scramble towards the bottom.
Hell, just to be fair and make sure that the Holy Underserved never have to sacrifice their beer and cigarette money for medical care, I'll work for whatever a recently graduated PA will take. I mean, it's not like the extra six years of training I got should count for anything.
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Go to the salary article on the first page of SDN and follow the BLS link and you will see the average salary for physicians as a group is $155,150.
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give me an example.
Do a search for the 10,000 premeds who have asked this question before. You can make money in anything. But you don't get rich off a salary. So to make real money you have to do something with inherent risk, but with a lot of upside. There are unlimited possibilities. But FWIW, doing well at any salaried field where you make money earlier gives you an often insurmountable lead over medicine, just due to the delay of income inherent in the path, and the fact that you have to borrow so much to get there. For instance a lot of us nontrads coming from high incomed professions will never catch up to where we would have been had we stayed put. The time value of money makes this impossible.
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But there's the catch: if going into medical school one can count on an annual income of $300k+, taking on large amounts of debt may be prudent investment decision. The problem is going to be with the folks who take out the high side of student debt ($300k) and end up at low end of the pay spectrum (the avg $160k or, god forbid, less) - that combo is going to be very tough to manage, and it will happen to more people than is otherwise believed on SDN.
Regardless, IMO people should minimize their student debt loads whenever possible, just in case that derm residency falls through. We are in the silly season of posts from people who ask "attend lowly State U or higher ranked private at an additional $150k?" and I think it is a no-brainer to avoid the debt, but I am in the minority on SDN, at least among pre-meds.
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My point (and I hardly think it a rant) is that adcoms don't dislike the answer because it's not what they want to hear -- ie not the P.C. answer. They don't like it because it is simply wrong and they aren't recruiting people who don't have the common sense to realize it. Sure there are people who try to give the right answers. But in this case it's not right (to emphasize money interest) because of a desire to show altruism, it's not right because this honest to god isn't a smart path for this. I actually think saying you are going into medicine to help people is an equally silly answer for different reasons, but that's fodder for other threads. I don't think you have to be altruistic, or have any professed interest in a primary care field to come off well in an interview. But I do think you have to be cognizant of the fact that if your primary goal is money, you are on the wrong path.
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Agreed. If you borrow $250k for med school, still have $50k outstanding from college, with an interest rate of, say, 8-9%, and then end up with that $120k peds job, and live in any sort of moderately high cost of living area, you might not be able to keep your head above water. And that's a physician earning six digits. Things are changing from just a few years ago, because the debt/interest side of the equation is fast outstripping the income side.
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In all fairness, I thought I did want to do PC and genuinely said so during interviews, but then I started reading all these PC hate threads and it has definitely driven me away from it.
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Don't hate it because of what any premed says. Explore it for yourself during rotations and then decide. For the right kind of person it's a fulfilling job.
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Yea I know, the lack of respect isnt as much as an issue as the compensation is, which seems to be universally on the low end. The PCs I always shadowed were pulling in a lot more than the figures stated here, not that I needed a ton of money, but I dont want to be living on a wage less than my uneducated parents (after taxes and loan payments) after 8 years of higher education.
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Well, duh. But if I had been a single, young medical student my entire medical school student loan burden would have been $120,000 or so, the service of which would be very manageable even on a primary care type salary. As for going to an expensive school and then falling into a low-paying specialty...it's a free country. Pick the cheaper state school if you can.
By the way, the payment for $200,000 at around 8 percent interest for 20 years is around $1600 bucks per month or around $20,000 per year.
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The nature of an average is that some people will be doing better. But about the same number will be doing worse.
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I wonder why people aren't up in arms about tuition going up 5% every year at college/med schools. Or $150-200 textbooks. Or $2000-3000 in mandatory fees that they won't just add on to tuition.
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Who says we aren't? But does that mean just because the price of education is going up your going to back down?
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Simple. This is a system where half the applicants don't get in. So if the ones who do balk, there are plenty more where they came from. If you have no power, you get no say.
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very true. "They got the power". As long as there are lines wrapped around campus to get into medical school
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very true. "They got the power". As long as there are lines wrapped around campus to get into medical school
I'm not sure if it is true or not, but I overheard some other people talking on campus about how some schools, even Harvard, have lowered their acceptance GPA due to lack of students applying and not meeting their quota? In a way, I wouldn't be surprised if this was happening. Anybody else hear about stuff like that?
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how many people applied to medical school last year?
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AAMC said about, 42,231 applicants in 2008. That is just U.S. residents, of course.
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Uh... Reading this thread makes me want to puke. I am appalled at how much complaint med/premed people are doing about salaries... guys your job is one of the most awesome ones in the whole wide world. How many jobs can you combine cutting-edge science, most recent discoveries, with constant problem solving and human interaction, and the awesome feeling of making real difference everyday?
And plus you make 100k+/yr, with almost 100% job security, immense respect in society. That is nothing to complain about, even with the large loans.
Honestly, 60k/yr is not little. It is much, much better than the national average of around 40k/yr income. That is nothing to scoff. And this comes from someone who had to live at around the poverty line for most of his life (for you insulated guys out there who might not even have a concept of what "poverty" is, the poverty line is around 13k/yr for a family of 3).
I'm even more appaled at the arrogance exhibited by some med students/prospective doctors. Being a doctor does not transform you into god-almighty. Some doctors have laughingly shallow skill, and unprofessional attitudes that makes me wonder if he should even be licensed. I'm not kidding. You are not entitled to be rich because you went through medschool internship hell. PhD's go all through those hellish years too, work their butt offs, have to exhibit incredible intellectual ingenuity, and end up in a 20k/yr postdoc job, and have absolutely no job security unless they end up being on a tenure- track position...which probably won't happen anyway (even tenure-track positions entail a whole lot of stress/work responsibility, and pay about 1/3 of what a specialist makes)
And plus you make 100k+/yr, with almost 100% job security, immense respect in society. That is nothing to complain about, even with the large loans.
Honestly, 60k/yr is not little. It is much, much better than the national average of around 40k/yr income. That is nothing to scoff. And this comes from someone who had to live at around the poverty line for most of his life (for you insulated guys out there who might not even have a concept of what "poverty" is, the poverty line is around 13k/yr for a family of 3).
I'm even more appaled at the arrogance exhibited by some med students/prospective doctors. Being a doctor does not transform you into god-almighty. Some doctors have laughingly shallow skill, and unprofessional attitudes that makes me wonder if he should even be licensed. I'm not kidding. You are not entitled to be rich because you went through medschool internship hell. PhD's go all through those hellish years too, work their butt offs, have to exhibit incredible intellectual ingenuity, and end up in a 20k/yr postdoc job, and have absolutely no job security unless they end up being on a tenure- track position...which probably won't happen anyway (even tenure-track positions entail a whole lot of stress/work responsibility, and pay about 1/3 of what a specialist makes)
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if i may ask what do you do for a living?
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I don't think any of them are complaining about making that much, what they are defending is that there are those on here saying the money doesn't mean anything and "yadda yadda," when it means a lot. The whole topic of this forum is that pay-cuts in medicine, if continued, is going to hurt a lot of people: doctors, patients, families, etc. Would you want to become a doctor and come out making average salary with everything you need to pay for and pay back?
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I'm a senior in high school, but I work my butt off in restaurants and mowing lawns and help out my parents (who are doing the same kind of jobs I am doing). So no, we are nowhere near 60k/yr. And hitting 80 hrs/week? That's routine for us. And I know some of my relatives who have been cooks, make 15k/yr, chopped off their fingers in their jobs, and can't pay for medical bills anyway... that's something to complain about!
And posts like this makes me want to puke. Honestly.
"Look, people ask me if medical school and residency are hard. The answer is yes and part of the reason why physicians should be worth more than what a PA or plumber is paid. There is no "boo hoo" about this at all. Medical training is long, rigorous, and produces highly trained physicians who can be trusted with the lives of their patients, something that most people understand on a visceral level.
If you think a mid-level making a third of what a doctor makes justifies your quest towards a lower salary then you clearly don't know many Physician Assistants and Nurse Practioners, most of whom are severely lacking in medical knowledge and skill and many of whom are truly frightening.
So you see, you need to stick up for your future profession. It is particularly irritating to me, now that I have only 81 days left of residency, to hear pre-meds bragging about how little they care for making money. Good Lord, at least put a couple of years of medical school away before you start doing this. It would be hard to find any fourth year medical students with such a cavalier attitude and if you do, this attitude will not survive the first month of their intern year.
Why? Are we greedy? Are we stupid? Are we vain, selfish, or arrogant? Of course not, it's just that by the time you see what medicine is all about and that the physician is the most important part of the whole goat rodeo, you will appreciate your value.
On the other hand, I never complain about medical school debt because it's just not that big a problem for most medical students. It only looks like a problem because most of you have never worked for more than pretend money (Starbucks, McDonalds, and etc.) and when your only prior experience is $5.75 an hour, a couple of hundred thousand looks like a lot of money when, in fact, as an investement if your human capital, it is not."
And posts like this makes me want to puke. Honestly.
"Look, people ask me if medical school and residency are hard. The answer is yes and part of the reason why physicians should be worth more than what a PA or plumber is paid. There is no "boo hoo" about this at all. Medical training is long, rigorous, and produces highly trained physicians who can be trusted with the lives of their patients, something that most people understand on a visceral level.
If you think a mid-level making a third of what a doctor makes justifies your quest towards a lower salary then you clearly don't know many Physician Assistants and Nurse Practioners, most of whom are severely lacking in medical knowledge and skill and many of whom are truly frightening.
So you see, you need to stick up for your future profession. It is particularly irritating to me, now that I have only 81 days left of residency, to hear pre-meds bragging about how little they care for making money. Good Lord, at least put a couple of years of medical school away before you start doing this. It would be hard to find any fourth year medical students with such a cavalier attitude and if you do, this attitude will not survive the first month of their intern year.
Why? Are we greedy? Are we stupid? Are we vain, selfish, or arrogant? Of course not, it's just that by the time you see what medicine is all about and that the physician is the most important part of the whole goat rodeo, you will appreciate your value.
On the other hand, I never complain about medical school debt because it's just not that big a problem for most medical students. It only looks like a problem because most of you have never worked for more than pretend money (Starbucks, McDonalds, and etc.) and when your only prior experience is $5.75 an hour, a couple of hundred thousand looks like a lot of money when, in fact, as an investement if your human capital, it is not."
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The national average income might be $40,000, but the average worker in America didn't go to college...let alone maintained a >3.5 GPA in college, took the MCAT, spent thousands on med school applications and interviews, spent 4 years in med school at $50k/year, spent thousands more on residency interviews, and then spent 3-7 years more years (not counting fellowships) in training while working 80 hours/week. Apples, meet oranges.
I'm not entitled to earn good money if I go through one of the toughest and most demanding training programs in the professional world?
REALLY?
I never knew so many SDN'ers were masochists.
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Never mind, that explains it.
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Thank you, good point!
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Uh... PhD's also go through that hell too. And guess what, the luckiest of them all would probably near 1/3 of your future salary, and get 1/10th of your job security.
"I'm not entitled to earn good money if I go through one of the toughest and most demanding training programs in the professional world?"
Obviously not. An MD even compared his military training as harder than his residency training. Do all military guys end up making the big bucks? No. Do all bio PhD's end up make more than 100k/yr? No.
Let's take a bio phD:
It takes: 4 yrs undergrad, a really good GPA, lots of research/publications, a whole lot of ingenuity, a crazy work ethic when you do your research, a lot of dedication with the 8yrs + of reasearch. If you are intelligent enough, and found something cool enough for you thesis, then you get your PhD (sucks for you otherwise). Guess what? No job security at all. You become a masochist postdoc workalholic, with 20k/yr, for an indefinite amount of time, until hopefully you get tenured. And guess what, once you are tenured, you won't make the big bucks either. I would be surprised to see professors make more than 100k/yr. And most of them, by that time, are 40-45 yrs old if they are lucky to ever be tenured (most PhD's never end up being professors, while most MD's end up being practicing doctors)
But at least, they enjoy their job enough that it's bearable. So must doctors, who are much, much better off.
"I'm not entitled to earn good money if I go through one of the toughest and most demanding training programs in the professional world?"
Obviously not. An MD even compared his military training as harder than his residency training. Do all military guys end up making the big bucks? No. Do all bio PhD's end up make more than 100k/yr? No.
Let's take a bio phD:
It takes: 4 yrs undergrad, a really good GPA, lots of research/publications, a whole lot of ingenuity, a crazy work ethic when you do your research, a lot of dedication with the 8yrs + of reasearch. If you are intelligent enough, and found something cool enough for you thesis, then you get your PhD (sucks for you otherwise). Guess what? No job security at all. You become a masochist postdoc workalholic, with 20k/yr, for an indefinite amount of time, until hopefully you get tenured. And guess what, once you are tenured, you won't make the big bucks either. I would be surprised to see professors make more than 100k/yr. And most of them, by that time, are 40-45 yrs old if they are lucky to ever be tenured (most PhD's never end up being professors, while most MD's end up being practicing doctors)
But at least, they enjoy their job enough that it's bearable. So must doctors, who are much, much better off.
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I don't want to get a PhD. 1/10th of my job security? You might want to look up this thing called 'tenure'. Apples, meet oranges.
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When you haven't been through this process, or part of the process, how can you lecture on it?
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Yeah, but when do you see a PhD getting sued for some pathetic reason, or a PhD not being able to start a family to his mid 30s, or how about the fact that PhDs get their professional school tuition paid for by the government. Have you ever volunteered or shadowed a doctor yet? Or are you going off assumption? You need to understand that those of us talking about how we care about the money doesn't mean we detest the whole idea of treating patients and being a doctor. Read some of the previous post a little more carefully. Honestly, if most of you don't care about how much you would make in your job (and this goes for any job) then you're not really being smart about your future. Because your landlord, you debt collectors, your insurance company and everyone else who wants your money doesn't care that you are a doctor. All they care about is that the check is in the mail.
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As I said before, most PhD's don't get tenure. And yes, I have the luck to have a half-broke PhD as a cousin, and a freaking rich MD as another cousin. And I have shadowed a few MD's, some of whom are absolutely awesome, and others who don't know what the meaning of ethical behavior is (like asking a HS student for his parents' credit card number for a shadowing experience).
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Dude, the physician is the most important part of the medical world. Learn it, love it, live it. The whole purpose of medicine is to put patients under the care of a physician. This is not to say that nobody else's job is important, of course.
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It takes very little skill to mow lawns and wait tables. I was a short order cook many years ago and it is not rocket science either. So sorry. That's why these jobs don't pay well.
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PhDs get paid terribly....so that means MD/DOs should get paid less?
Since you think doctors should only earn $60k, you can give me everything you earn over that limit.
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"The whole purpose of medicine is to put patients under the care of a physician."
That's the ideal medical world.
Sometimes it becomes, the "whole purpose of the physician is to put the patient's money in his pocket." Many, many physicians, after living through hell, definitely lose sight of what you said.
"Since you think doctors should only earn $60k"
I Never said that. The original poster who put $60k meant it without debt, and straight out of college. And he got flamed. My point was that what doctors make and will make will probably never be undercompensating them, and is definitely not sth to complain about. I rarely see a tenured-track professor complain he's too poor. Why should MD/premeds complain so much?
That's the ideal medical world.
Sometimes it becomes, the "whole purpose of the physician is to put the patient's money in his pocket." Many, many physicians, after living through hell, definitely lose sight of what you said.
"Since you think doctors should only earn $60k"
I Never said that. The original poster who put $60k meant it without debt, and straight out of college. And he got flamed. My point was that what doctors make and will make will probably never be undercompensating them, and is definitely not sth to complain about. I rarely see a tenured-track professor complain he's too poor. Why should MD/premeds complain so much?
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Tttaa, take a step back and admit that you are young and while you may have experiences pertinent to minimum wage labor, you have no clue what doctors do or the risks involved in their work. You simply do not understand how taxing a physician lifestyle can be and, when compared to the multitude of other comparable professional career paths that offer far better time/money compensation, we want to defend our entitlement to being paid what we are worth. We did not stop working for 8+ years to make the same amount as a car salesman does, even if it is enough to live off of.
