It is confusing now reading. I assumed the OP was referring to the medscape article that showed PM&R least satisfied with compensation.
Medscape physician compensation
That makes sense.
Looking at the survey, 50% of physiatrists feel fairly compensated, as well as 53% of FM. About half of specialties are around 49-54%, which to me is all the same. The data really isn't all that useful, in my opinion. No med student bases their specialty choice on how many physicians in a field feel fairly compensated.
Keep in mind most people in general don't feel fairly compensated--a quick google search (very unscientific...) throws out 36-48% of Americans feel fairly compensated.
I think a large part is also likely that older physicians were used to being paid more when they were in independent practice, and now many are employees, or spending more for EMRs, and ultimately getting paid less.
Physicians probably feel more compensated than the general population because we are. $237k (generalists) to $341k (specialists) is a TON of money. Physicians that feel they aren't getting paid enough are people that will complain regardless of what they make, and/or are basing their feelings on what other doctors are getting paid. I think it's rather ridiculous ortho surgeons get paid so much more than FM. It's even more ridiculous that NFL players make more than ortho, and that teachers make about 1/4 the salary of a PCP. But we just can't read too much into the salary stuff--we know what the salaries are going into our fields, so when people complain that their salary that is more than 3-4x the median American
household, it makes us seem rather out of touch. Yes, we work had, and we sacrifice a lot, but so do lots of other Americans. They have high debt loads as well (and often don't have wealthier parents like many physicians). We have BS paperwork (it's really not that bad in PM&R...), but so does everyone else. Cops spend all day writing reports on their computers as well.
Some people just have a habit of complaining. Look at me-I'm complaining about people complaining.
PM&R has some odd statistics lately now that it's been included in a few studies. Apparently we're the happiest residents, but the most burnt out as attendings (which seems weird to me-I've really never met an unhappy physiatrist..). And as J4Pac mentions, we would choose PM&R again, but not medicine. These are all somewhat at odds with each other.
We're a hard field to analyze. The older generation of PM&R comes with the stuff older specialists all come with (being disappointed with EMRs, the transition to being hospital employees, etc.), but also out field used to be mostly made up of people who failed to match ortho, and FMGs who were practicing other specialties (especially ortho) in their home country. And it was inpatient-dominated. Now we're outpatient-dominated (at least that's the preference for most med students/residents going into PM&R), hardly any IMG/FMGs match into PM&R, we're rarely a "backup" specialty anymore, and we have among the highest rate of seats filled in the match (higher than many surgical specialties, despite our near lowest mean USMLE scores). And to top things off, we're such a small specialty that is often overlooked, it's probably fairly easy for data to skew one way or the other.
I for one, don't ever recall filling out a Medscape survey. I mean, who really fills those out? I'm not telling some big data company what my salary is.
