Combining medicine with business

[OncoCaP]

From time to time I see questions from other students who wonder if residency is required, whether they can just do one year, etc. I ran across this story as an example of what one student (resident) did just so you have a real datapoint. You can actually message this MD and get more information.
I'm enjoying medical school quite a lot and am more convinced this is right for me every day; however, know that others want to take a non-traditional route / career path. I thought it was interesting that the doctor in the following story left medicine as a resident to improve his health and life success. I'm not suggesting that there isn't plenty of opportunity to live well in medicine. This story just shows that some folks take a different route and find help doing something other than their childhood dream:


http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/health/2008/06/18/gupta.fit.nation.chinyere.cnn
http://www.dontgobrokediet.com/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/drkal

I'm not sure I have the whole story, but it looks like he's selling e-books for $19.97, promoting various health products and the like. Maybe he will sign a marketing deal with McDonalds, since he really likes their food and promotes it heavily. He appears to have a knack for marketing (getting on CNN, for example). It just seems ironic that someone would leave traditional medicine to promote health, but I expect that many physicians will combine various business avenues with their medical background and become successful that way like Dr. Weil and others have done.

So anyway, hope that story was interested for some of the folks looking to combine business and medicine. My goal is not to discourage anyone from medicine but rather to answer a common question I see here frequently.

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[Cranial Gavage]

Thanks for posting.

I've been considering that sort of thing recently. . . I'm interested in the work of Carl Jung, though I'd prefer to apply my medical education to an internal medicine specialty.

So, I thought about working as a hospitalist (for instance) a few days a week while having a "private practice" as a Jungian analyst on the side. Two different kinds of healing, I suppose.

 

[DrJosephKim]

There are many non-clinical opportunities for people who don't do a residency. Of course, it really helps to have clinical experience, but it's not a prerequisite if you want to pursue things on the business side of healthcare.

 

[Law2Doc]

There are many non-clinical opportunities for people who don't do a residency. Of course, it really helps to have clinical experience, but it's not a prerequisite if you want to pursue things on the business side of healthcare.

It's HUGELY helpful. I'm not sure what you'd define as a prereq, but I'd say it's kind of semantics here. In business, your experience frequently matters more than your degree. Meaning coming right out of med school means squat compared to coming out of residency as a licensed doctor. In business it's a culture thing, dating back to when some folks worked their way up from the mailroom to become superstars, because they knew more than the folks with the fancy college/business school degrees. You still see this manifested in the fact that most of the better MBA programs require folks to have 2 years of business work experience before even applying to business school. So yeah, you really benefit yourself a ton for a lot of business tracks if you spend a year or two of residency, get licensed, and then make the switch, rather than try to get some value out of a paper degree that most people aren't going to value as much as the skillset you haven't acquired yet. Of course, most people who do a year or two of residency tend to finish it up (the path of least resistance), and never make the jump. Which is why business is not swarming with physicians and why they still have value there. Plus if you get a bit of residency under your belt, you still have a shot of returning to medicine if you realize the grass is not greener. Not so easy if you get your MD and don't do some residency - so most people keep the door open for this reason as well.