Intellectually Demanding and Respectable career besides MD/DO??

[TigerEyes170]

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What other careers in the healthcare field do you consider intellectually challenging and highly respected??

I'm new here and just curious of your opinion as I am trying to help a friend with careers choices. Thanks!

 

[mmmcdowe]

What other careers in the healthcare field do you consider intellectually challenging and highly respected??

I'm new here and just curious of your opinion as I am trying to help a friend with careers choices. Thanks!

You can't have both. PA and Nurse Practitioners can be intellectually challenging, but doctors are simply the most respected in the health care field.

 

[variablistic]

You can't have both. PA and Nurse Practitioners can be intellectually challenging, but doctors are simply the most respected in the health care field.

OP didn't say the most respected; he/she said highly.

PAs and NPs are both highly respected and offer more flexibility which can be very intellectually challenging. A PA I know just switched from surgery service to derm, so if that is attractive to your friend, encourage him/her to go that route.

 

[Kaustikos]

What other careers in the healthcare field do you consider intellectually challenging and highly respected??

I'm new here and just curious of your opinion as I am trying to help a friend with careers choices. Thanks!

Would you include Pharmaceuticals or simply restricted to working in a hospital?

Ever try Pharmacy?
Or Research Fellow at a Pharmaceuticals company?

 

[redlight]

dentist.. clinical psychologist, healthcare administrator, nurse practitioner, researcher, professor of a med subject (phd, don't think you need md for all of them), podiatrist (ew), nutritionist/dietician, physical therapist(*), a public health person haha

actually i dont know if the careers are intellectually stimulating, but i think it's likely they are.

(*) not sure about this one..

 

[redlight]

Would you include Pharmaceuticals or simply restricted to working in a hospital?

Ever try Pharmacy?
Or Research Fellow at a Pharmaceuticals company?

i hear pharmacy is boring, repetitive, and you have very little autonomy and have to listen to people b*tch and whine all day and read doctor's terrible handwritting for perscriptions... i have a friend who just finished school (at one of the well known programs) and already had a job way before she graduated.. she hates the work (too monotonous for her, too much whining) and is already thinking about law school. shes making a lot of money though as a person in their low/mid 20s.. (>100K a year)

 

[rabidpanda13]

Dietitian is my backup plan. You still get to work in a clinical setting (if you want to), you get to interact with patients and get to treat and take care of a number of conditions (diabetes, vitamin deficiencies, etc.).

 

[161468]

I think it's funny that you consider medicine to be an intellectual field. It's just memorization, plain and simple.

 

[Nilf]

What other careers in the healthcare field do you consider intellectually challenging and highly respected??

I'm new here and just curious of your opinion as I am trying to help a friend with careers choices. Thanks!

Medicine is hardly intellectually stimulating field for the most part. There are certain niches, but by and large it involves brute memorization and regurgitation of factoids. Contrary what you see in 'House', there is very little room for creativity and independent thought. You are going to impress your colleagues by encyclopedic knowledge of completely arbitrary facts, not by thinking outside of the box.

 

[Kaustikos]

Medicine is hardly intellectually stimulating field for the most part. There are certain niches, but by and large it involves brute memorization and regurgitation of factoids. Contrary what you see in 'House', there is very little room for creativity and independent thought. You are going to impress your colleagues by encyclopedic knowledge of completely arbitrary facts, not by thinking outside of the box.

Well, it'll come in handy in Jeopardy, when they have one segment with one choice of Medical/Human Facts..........

 

[Moebius]

Honestly, 99.99% of the time, it is better to go into a career that make a lot of money. I am not going to lie.

If I didn't have a specific purpose to go premed, I would have gone into investment banking. You will make several times more than doctors if you are good (high pressure), but you can have an comfortable life. Most important, people are doing money, you can make money.

 

[redlight]

Honestly, 99.99% of the time, it is better to go into a career that make a lot of money. I am not going to lie.

If I didn't have a specific purpose to go premed, I would have gone into investment banking. You will make several times more than doctors if you are good (high pressure), but you can have an comfortable life. Most important, people are doing money, you can make money.

ive lost nearly 100k in the stock market (vse) in the last 2 weeks. i never want to see the word "invest" ever again.

 

[Moebius]

Vse? Whats that? If you are good, you should be losing at money at all.

 

[DrYoda]

Vse? Whats that? If you are good, you should be losing at money at all.

a ticker.

 

[DrYoda]

I think it's funny that you consider medicine to be an intellectual field. It's just memorization, plain and simple.

Medicine is hardly intellectually stimulating field for the most part. There are certain niches, but by and large it involves brute memorization and regurgitation of factoids. Contrary what you see in 'House', there is very little room for creativity and independent thought. You are going to impress your colleagues by encyclopedic knowledge of completely arbitrary facts, not by thinking outside of the box.

To the OP: I basically agree with the above setiment. As far as intellectual challenge goes, you can find just as much if not more intellectual challenge in fields like engineering, research and business.

 

[redlight]

Vse? Whats that? If you are good, you should be losing at money at all.

and THATS why im sticking w/ medicine..

j/k

and vse = virtual stock exchange 😛

and lots of people are losing money.. the dow plummeted again today..

 

[airplanes]

Well, it'll come in handy in Jeopardy, when they have one segment with one choice of Medical/Human Facts..........

Hell yeah, I look forward to dominating medically related Jeopardy categories from home.

 

[Law2Doc]

What other careers in the healthcare field do you consider intellectually challenging and highly respected??

I'm new here and just curious of your opinion as I am trying to help a friend with careers choices. Thanks!

Respectability is a strange thing to look for in a career. And you might find yourself disappointed in medicine, when you have patient after patient who doesn't respect you beyond your ability to give them a prescription, who get angry with you for long waits and then storm out of your office in a huff, threatening malpractice, when you assure them that no antibiotics are necessary for a viral illness. It's not going to be the fantasy you are imagining if you are looking for a career that folks put up on a pedestal. Pretty much the only one who respects you will be premeds. When you hear celebs like Mike Tyson and Cindy Crawford saying that if they didn't go into their respective fields they would have become a doctor, you get the picture that the lay public doesn't even think it's all that hard. So no, don't count on respect. Those days have come and gone.

 

[Kaustikos]

Respectability is a strange thing to look for in a career. And you might find yourself disappointed in medicine, when you have patient after patient who doesn't respect you beyond your ability to give them a prescription, who get angry with you for long waits and then storm out of your office in a huff, threatening malpractice, when you assure them that no antibiotics are necessary for a viral illness. It's not going to be the fantasy you are imagining if you are looking for a career that folks put up on a pedestal. Pretty much the only one who respects you will be premeds. When you hear celebs like Mike Tyson and Cindy Crawford saying that if they didn't go into their respective fields they would have become a doctor, you get the picture that the lay public doesn't even think it's all that hard. So no, don't count on respect. Those days have come and gone.

That's because you guys are doing it wrong. You guys need to wear nazi uniforms (without the symbol, of course) and storm around barking orders in german to everyone and calling them idiots when they don't comprehend.


That or just stick to having fellows/residents following you singing R-E-S-P-E-C-T while you walk down the the hallways.

 

[TheElement]

Vse? Whats that? If you are good, you should be losing at money at all.

I'm pretty sure there are very, very few "good" people in today's economic environment.

 

[deleted239798]

Respectability is a strange thing to look for in a career. And you might find yourself disappointed in medicine, when you have patient after patient who doesn't respect you beyond your ability to give them a prescription, who get angry with you for long waits and then storm out of your office in a huff, threatening malpractice, when you assure them that no antibiotics are necessary for a viral illness. It's not going to be the fantasy you are imagining if you are looking for a career that folks put up on a pedestal. Pretty much the only one who respects you will be premeds. When you hear celebs like Mike Tyson and Cindy Crawford saying that if they didn't go into their respective fields they would have become a doctor, you get the picture that the lay public doesn't even think it's all that hard. So no, don't count on respect. Those days have come and gone.

I don't think he was saying he was going into medicine for respect. And many surveys show that the public perception of doctors is very positive.

 

[NonTradMed]

It's not going to be the fantasy you are imagining if you are looking for a career that folks put up on a pedestal. Pretty much the only one who respects you will be premeds. When you hear celebs like Mike Tyson and Cindy Crawford saying that if they didn't go into their respective fields they would have become a doctor, you get the picture that the lay public doesn't even think it's all that hard. So no, don't count on respect. Those days have come and gone.

Actually, I take that as meaning the exact opposite. Celebrities say they may have gone into medicine precisely because they think it's a well respected career. Most people don't say, "If I didn't become an actor, I would have become a ditch-digger", do they?

Saying you want to be a doctor denotes that you want to do something "fulfilling" and which requires hard work. It's that general idea of physician being a well-respect profession of do-gooders that suckers so many college students into it in the first place.

Besides, don't ditch Cindy Crawford, she graduated valedictorian in her class and got an academic scholarship to study chemical engineering at Northwestern University. 😀

The lay public still has respect for doctors and they understand it takes "forever" to train as one---it's one reason I've heard people say why they *don't* want to become physicians. There are people who don't respect doctors, but the general impression is that doctors are smart people who can 'help people'. I think physicians generally rank very high on people's list of trusted professions. That's not a good enough reason to go into it, but doctors don't have a bad reputation.

 

[JaggerPlate]

Honestly, 99.99% of the time, it is better to go into a career that make a lot of money. I am not going to lie.

If I didn't have a specific purpose to go premed, I would have gone into investment banking. You will make several times more than doctors if you are good (high pressure), but you can have an comfortable life. Most important, people are doing money, you can make money.

Yeah those I-bankers are killing right now. You wouldn't have been out of a job until 2011 when the economy bounces back. Also, there is a 99% chance that unless you came from Harvard business school and were prepped to work 80 hours a week ... you would NOT be the wal-street wizard making 7 figures.

 

[IHeartNerds]

Also, there is a 99% chance that unless you came from Harvard business school and were prepped to work 80 hours a week ... you would NOT be the wal-street wizard making 7 figures.

I knew a lot of bankers back a few years ago that worked a lot more than 80 hours a week. being a junior i-banker on wall street is like being an intern before the 80 hour work week existed. of course, many of those same bankers would now happily work 40 hours a week if it meant having a job at all...

back to the original topic, i'll throw in radiation physicist to the non-MD healthcare pile.

 

[cpants]

When you hear celebs like Mike Tyson and Cindy Crawford saying that if they didn't go into their respective fields they would have become a doctor, you get the picture that the lay public doesn't even think it's all that hard. So no, don't count on respect. Those days have come and gone.

Who's to say they couldn't have done it? The chances of becoming a physician are certainly better than the odds of becoming heavyweight champion of the world or one of the most successful supermodels in history.

 

[usermike8500]

If you want respect, go with pharmacy or dentistry.

If you want to get rich, go with nursing. Chief nurse anesthetists can make $200,000.00 per year as their base salary. That salary is so large, it's easier to express it as $2.00 x 10^5 per year. Don't believe me? look it up on www.salary.com.
Of course, that reference is a bit dubious, but at least I have a reference.
😎

 

[usermike8500]

Being a junior i-banker on wall street is like being an intern before the 80 hour work week existed.

Yes, but unlike interns, I don't think junior I-bankers earn what amounts to $4/hour. Is that about right for a resident? Divide $35,000/year by the 26 hours/day residents are required to work. 😉

Still, all things considered, I wouldn't choose any career other than medicine.

 

[Blesbok]

Yes, but unlike interns, I don't think junior I-bankers earn what amounts to $4/hour. Is that about right for a resident? Divide $35,000/year by the 26 hours/day residents are required to work. 😉

Still, all things considered, I wouldn't choose any career other than medicine.

$43k/year average intern salary with an 80 work week results in about $8/hr if you consider anything over 40 hours to be overtime.

 

[Lokhtar]

Physicist.

 

[Blesbok]

Nuclear rocket surgeon

 

[DOquestions]

The scientists who measure the distance between stars, objects in space, and the like have the out most respect from me. I love reading what big findings these scientists make and just awww at how complicated their work must be.

 

[Ibn Rushd]

^ Astronomers / astrophysicists you mean?

 

[Lokhtar]

Particle Physics is the shiznit. I was very close to going for a gradute degree in physics.

 

[DOquestions]

Particle Physics is the shiznit. I was very close to going for a gradute degree in physics.

Agreed. Just the idea of studying energy spin physics, hadron structure studies with neutrinos and polarized protons, neutrino oscillation physics, spectroscopy of exotic hadrons, fundamental neutron physics, and several electric dipole moment searches gives me a headache.