OMFSCardsFan said:
It would be easier to list the reasons for choosing medicine over dentistry...
1. Prestige
Ok, there's my list...
To be honest, when your profession (a huge portion of your life) is involved, you need to do more research than asking people what they think the pros and cons are. Everyone finds they're own reasons why they think one is more suitable for them than the other. You will get completely opposite answers to this question here as opposed to in a medicine forum. It doesn't mean that one is better than the other, it just means that one is better for a certain person than the other. You're going to find, if you decide dentistry is for you, completely different reasons than I did for why dentistry is right for me. Asking the question here may get you started, but the majority of the information that people will post, including mine, is completely biased based on personal preferences which may not be similar to your own.
Heya,
I will be graduating from medical school this summer and my sister is currently in dental school. If you think medicine is about prestige....you apparently don't know many doctors personally or the hardships they endure everyday, even as full fledged attendings.
Before you embark on this journey to choose between dentistry and medicine, why don't you go talk to a few doctors and dentists like the previous posts have mentioned....go shadow for a few days perhaps. However, I wouldn't make the mistake of what another post above mentioned in terms of how they decided on dentistry vs medicine. Namely that he talked to a 'SURGEON' and decided that it was not for him. I doubt he simply talked to one surgeon one day and made a decision. IF that was the case, then he/she didn't get a very good view of the profession.
Medicine involves a lot more than surgery. There are disciplines that span the entire range of every organ system specifically and every point of care.
If you are looking for prestige, I don't think either field is for you. What is prestigious about dealing with people's mouths and teeths everyday or examining people's blood and urine or explaining to a patient that they have a disease and you are going to have to place them on meds or will have to perform surgery on them?
What people going into all health fields should have in common is an appreciation of the human being, their relationships, their experiences and what you can do to help/heal them when they have something go wrong within them. It's an earnest to improve a person's quality of life, no matter how profound or superficial it may be. If this isn't your purpose, you'll find yourself in a less than glamorous place and time (drudging through every nuclei of the brainstem for an anatomy exam, admitting a patient at 3am who has multiple medical issues, working on the mouth of a patient who has halitosis, multiple rotten teeth, and oral ulcers because he has no home to go and brush his teeth) wishing you were doing something else because you could care less about the person you will/are treating. If you like to help people genuinely, then welcome to the health professions. Otherwise look elsewhere.
Aside from talking to people and volunteering/shadowing, why don't you go to a medical bookstore and a dental bookstore (I don't know if there are separate bookstores entirely devoted to dentistry) and look over some books. Or perhaps go to the local dental/medical library of the school nearby and scan the books. Talk to the students while you are at it. However, you look at it....the health professions in general are self-learning and lifelong learning professions where YOU will have to seek out info on your own to keep up to date with all the changes occurring at such rapid rates. Go find out for yourself whether healthcare is for you. If so, then explore your options.
You don't need to get a degree of 'DOCTOR' to treat people these days either. You can work in healthcare as a PA, NP, dental assistant, tech, etc...and they are all equally important. So....FIGURE YOURSELF OUT!
Hope it wasn't too heavy for anyone. Bottom line is MAKE AN INFORMED DECISION.
👍
And if anyone has questions for me about medicne, just PM me. Again, I am JUST a medical student now...so don't expect me to give you insight like an experienced physician.
All I can say about the dental profession is I admire what you all do....watching my sister read about all the different dental materials and spend seemingly endless hours in the lab doing mounts/preps is exhausting. And that's just the little I've seen of her life in dental school....I can't begin to imagine. Power to you all!