Medscape Comp Report 2018

[ButterButter]

Rich surgeons aren't responding to these surveys i bet. there are no rich gas docs. they are all capped by # of hours in a day.

Anesthesiology salary is not doing well compared to the past, despite still being in the 300s. They are also doing way more casees to make that salary. And it's likely to slowly get worse.



EM residency competitiveness has skyrocketted recently because people are realizing how good of a field it is. One of few fields with lots of flexibility in terms of work hours, and one the highest salaries per hour, and one of the few specialties that makes a lot and has time to spend their money.



Since your perception of gas is so off, you should visit their forums to see what it is really like and how depressing it is. (Awful life style consisting of many nights, days, weekends. One of the highest hours worked per week out of all the specialties w avg of 61hrs/week. Not flexible. Good luck finding that mommy track at a location near you) Though still a good option if your step score is garbage

Looks like someone regrets their career choice.

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[gshocke]

But you will have to deal with surgeons...

Okay? The big bad scary surgeon thing is getting old. What are they going to do? Be mean to you? Scold you like a child? Put you in time out?

Trust me, I don’t have to “deal with surgeons”, surgeons have to deal with me...

 

[spacegun]

Okay? The big bad scary surgeon thing is getting old. What are they going to do? Be mean to you? Scold you like a child? Put you in time out?

Trust me, I don’t have to “deal with surgeons”, surgeons have to deal with me...

Some surgeons can be really mean, but most surgeons I have met are fine and this generation of surgeons has better and more positive attitudes toward everyone in the OR I really do think.

But the bigger issue with surgeons is that if you are in anesthesia (and I am seriously considering anesthesia too), then you often have to work on their schedule. If they go late on a case or there are add on cases, then you stay late too. If the surgeons your group works with prefer to work on the weekends, then that's what your group has to do too. If they are in the hospital in the middle of the night, and you're on call, then you are also in the hospital in the middle of the night. Anesthesiologists are dependent on surgeons for patients, and surgeons know this, and while they might be nice people, it's human nature to want to look out for yourself first, and that is how surgeons will often prioritize their work and life for their own and their own family's benefits, not other people's including not the anesthesiologist's benefit. That is the bigger issue with working alongside surgeons as I understand it. Anesthesiologists and surgeons are in a symbiotic relationship, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health!

 

[anbuitachi]

Looks like someone regrets their career choice.

Regret med school? hell yea. there are many ways to help people. once i got old and my joints started hurting, i realized how much of a toll the training put on my me physically and mentally compared to peers not in medicine. I too dream of going to work at 9am and coming home to family at 5pm.. and still end up with a higher retirement saving than a physician's

Regret anesthesiology? Not really. Has its up and downs but i do find it the most interesting out of all the choices.

But really though i just sometimes get annoyed since it's as if no one knows what anesthesiologists do/what their lifestyles are like and only look at forbes. can't tell you the # of times people have told me anesthesiologists are the richest doctors cause they saw it on forbes

 

[Lnghrn]

Regret med school? hell yea. there are many ways to help people. once i got old and my joints started hurting, i realized how much of a toll the training put on my me physically and mentally compared to peers not in medicine. I too dream of going to work at 9am and coming home to family at 5pm.. and still end up with a higher retirement saving than a physician's

Regret anesthesiology? Not really. Has its up and downs but i do find it the most interesting out of all the choices.

But really though i just sometimes get annoyed since it's as if no one knows what anesthesiologists do/what their lifestyles are like and only look at forbes. can't tell you the # of times people have told me anesthesiologists are the richest doctors cause they saw it on forbes

This might be a really naïve response, because I myself have not been through medschool/residency (just considering it. I have 2 brothers and 10 cousins who have gone through it). 3 high level points: 1) health 2) salary 3) happiness. Regarding 1) Why did the journey put such a toll on you physically and mentally? Based on what I have read on these forums, stress is really dependent on your personality type and on your circumstances (i.e. loans). How do these apply to you?

2) I am not too experienced with corp America but it seems that with some hard work you can bring in about 150-200k after 5-10 years of work but it’s not guaranteed. Some will work less some will work more for it. Also, I definitely do not work 9-5. I travel for work M-Th (which as a single person, I enjoy), and I work 8a-8p usually. 3) happiness is so relative that it may or may not make you happy. For example, I am currently helping a client optimize their business but all they do is make candy. No way can I know whether my actions are helping anyone. I would much rather be working in an academic setting as a physician investigating diseases like epidermolysis bullosa (this is where perhaps the naiveite is).

 

[zanzizic]

I’m a private practice Mohs surgeon and my best friend is a private practice pain doc. This was our conversation the other day:

Derm: Hey did you see the Medscape Comp Report data?

Pain: Yeah. Why are all the specialties so low?

Derm: I’m not sure but I’ve always wondered that.

Pain: Maybe because it’s just a bunch of academic docs or employed physicians answering the surveys?

Derm: Maybe. Did you fill one out?

Pain: Nah. You?

Derm: Nope.

 

[whatisthisstuff]

Okay? The big bad scary surgeon thing is getting old. What are they going to do? Be mean to you? Scold you like a child? Put you in time out?

Trust me, I don’t have to “deal with surgeons”, surgeons have to deal with me...

 

[anbuitachi]

This might be a really naïve response, because I myself have not been through medschool/residency (just considering it. I have 2 brothers and 10 cousins who have gone through it). 3 high level points: 1) health 2) salary 3) happiness. Regarding 1) Why did the journey put such a toll on you physically and mentally? Based on what I have read on these forums, stress is really dependent on your personality type and on your circumstances (i.e. loans). How do these apply to you?

2) I am not too experienced with corp America but it seems that with some hard work you can bring in about 150-200k after 5-10 years of work but it’s not guaranteed. Some will work less some will work more for it. Also, I definitely do not work 9-5. I travel for work M-Th (which as a single person, I enjoy), and I work 8a-8p usually. 3) happiness is so relative that it may or may not make you happy. For example, I am currently helping a client optimize their business but all they do is make candy. No way can I know whether my actions are helping anyone. I would much rather be working in an academic setting as a physician investigating diseases like epidermolysis bullosa (this is where perhaps the naiveite is).

It's complicated and many factors come into play. I think the most important reason is most pre meds do not know what they are getting into and/or do not know how the journey would affect them. They think they want to help people, maybe have seen some sick people suffer or family member suffer and therefore wanted to be a healer, or maybe they were interested in biology/science and that's why they decided to do medicine. (Big mistake for many people). After that, they have to work really hard since college (some even HS to get into as good a college as possible). In college they have to work hard to maintain a decent GPA, while doing extracurriculars/research to pad your resume. Senior year is spent filling out applications, writing essays, and going away for interviews. This takes away a lot of time from personal use starting from college. Many students spend their summers doing research, or studying for MCAT. Some even take gap year/years to boost their resume after college. I went to a ivy college, the recommended gpa is at least a 3.7 to have a good shot at getting into med school. (i believe it was 80% chance or so). A lot of people end up not making it (due to weed out classes) and change career paths in college.

Once the clueless pre med gets into med school, a whole new beast starts. You now officially a grown man/woman, but has zero power and is essentially everyones B****. Your existence is pretty meaningless to the hospital aside from the 60k tuition you pay to them per year. You get drowned in debt with interest that starts to grow from the day you take out the loan. You are spending all day/night memorizing useless information while your non med friends are making money and enjoying their best years. Especially in the beginning , it's not uncommon to get completely overwhelmed by the amount of information you have to know. A 6 month class in college is taught in 1-2 weeks in med school. (You also dont get the vacations that you get in college, like winter/summer/spring break) . You spend about 80 hrs a week studying. Then year 2 comes and you still studying for your classes, and on top of that, there's the step 1 exam that will determine your life so you are studying for that too. If you haven't stopped going to the gym or eating healthy or cutting into your sleep, nows the ideal time.

Then year 3-4 comes and you are 6 figures in debt. You've probably either gained weight from stress eating, or lost weight from not eating. You also look like ****, like you've gained 20 years, from not going to the gym and not sleeping. You've lost all contact with non medicine friends and the only thing you talk about with your 'new' friends is medicine cause that's all you do during your waking hours. Year 3-4 can be better or worse depending on the student. You are now working 60-80 hours a week in the hospital + you are expected to study after work so you dont look stupid at work, and for the exams at the end of each rotation. It's usually now that med students realize how useless they are. You only get in the way of the residents/attendings. The nurses, and techs treat you like garbage and you may be asked to do scut work. On surgery for example, i got to the hospital at 330AM, and left at 7PM on average. Somehow after that i have to eat, read, and sleep. All i did during work was present patients before OR, then retract in the OR. The environment was pretty crappy cause no one was happy from being overworked. A good day is when you learn more than a couple of things. You start thinking if this is really a good use of 60k tuition a year. Then 4th year comes and you realize you have to make the life altering decision of which residency to apply to. If it's competitive, hopefully you were doing research on top of everything mentioned above. Either way now it's time to study for Step 2 CK and CS which costs 2k total and is a complete waste of time, but still very stressful.

Residency comes and you realize you made your decision of which residency to go into solely based on 1-2 months of rotation. You realize being a resident is nothing like being a med student. Hopefully you at least dont end up hating your choice. But you are still working 80 hours a week, now with more production pressure. Your decisions actually matter! You start making a salary and realize if you live frugal, you can cover the interest on your 200k+ loans. You are still low on the totem pole and the nurses are still rude to you. You are now 26-29 years old and the only thing you have to show for your lifelong work is your mountain of debt. You are still eating crap, barely sleeping, and barely working out. Your non med friends are already buying houses and getting married and having kids. You ask yourself again why you decided to go into your field and torture yourself. 3-8 years later you are jaded, you dont find things exciting anymore cause you are tired and you've seen them many times already. You aged 50 years and your joints hurt. You are still drowning in loans, and then you realize the jobs out there suck. You probably have to move across country again to find a decent job. Then you ask yourself if you should do a fellowship, and if you do hopefully you did some research in residency. Then finally when you are done at age 35, you realize you finally need to get your life on track. You may want kids, a house, start paying off those loans and maybe save for retirement.

TLDR
1) I think mainly because of the imbalance between reality vs expectations. People go into medicine expecting one thing then finding out its completely different. You work 80 hrs a week for 10 years after college in a high stake environment, it slowly eats at you and drains you down. You are often working weekends, and get maybe half the federal holidays off. (since hospitals are open 24/7). You are so tired you stop working out, and dont have time to sleep and eat well. When you applied to med school, you were young and energetic. You probably told yourself you can handle 80 hrs a week no problem. Then reality hits and you realize it sucks and you can't do this for 10 years straight. The loans are also way higher than expected cause pre meds probably didn't do the math or didn't know how it worked. Most patients also dont appreciate you. Even after the 10 year of post college training, the salary is lower than expected, people also get bothered by litigations, increased regulations and bureaucracies, lack of freedom to practice , etc. Basically a lot of things you didn't know when you were a pre med.

And it definitely depends on a persons personality. But thats not something that can be easily changed. I know people who LOVES to work and dont mind working 100 hours a week til retirement. Some people may also be bad with deaths, but other people may be able to bounce back in 2 minutes and move on. Everything matters. Other people may have outside things going on that only adds to the stress. It may drive them to depression even suicide.

 

[anbuitachi]

I’m a private practice Mohs surgeon and my best friend is a private practice pain doc. This was our conversation the other day:

Derm: Hey did you see the Medscape Comp Report data?

Pain: Yeah. Why are all the specialties so low?

Derm: I’m not sure but I’ve always wondered that.

Pain: Maybe because it’s just a bunch of academic docs or employed physicians answering the surveys?

Derm: Maybe. Did you fill one out?

Pain: Nah. You?

Derm: Nope.

Haha cause a PP mohs surgeon gets >1M and a PP pain guy gets >500k 😉

 

[zero0]

It's complicated and many factors come into play. I think the most important reason is most pre meds do not know what they are getting into and/or do not know how the journey would affect them. They think they want to help people, maybe have seen some sick people suffer or family member suffer and therefore wanted to be a healer, or maybe they were interested in biology/science and that's why they decided to do medicine. (Big mistake for many people). After that, they have to work really hard since college (some even HS to get into as good a college as possible). In college they have to work hard to maintain a decent GPA, while doing extracurriculars/research to pad your resume. Senior year is spent filling out applications, writing essays, and going away for interviews. This takes away a lot of time from personal use starting from college. Many students spend their summers doing research, or studying for MCAT. Some even take gap year/years to boost their resume after college. I went to a ivy college, the recommended gpa is at least a 3.7 to have a good shot at getting into med school. (i believe it was 80% chance or so). A lot of people end up not making it (due to weed out classes) and change career paths in college.

Once the clueless pre med gets into med school, a whole new beast starts. You now officially a grown man/woman, but has zero power and is essentially everyones B****. Your existence is pretty meaningless to the hospital aside from the 60k tuition you pay to them per year. You get drowned in debt with interest that starts to grow from the day you take out the loan. You are spending all day/night memorizing useless information while your non med friends are making money and enjoying their best years. Especially in the beginning , it's not uncommon to get completely overwhelmed by the amount of information you have to know. A 6 month class in college is taught in 1-2 weeks in med school. (You also dont get the vacations that you get in college, like winter/summer/spring break) . You spend about 80 hrs a week studying. Then year 2 comes and you still studying for your classes, and on top of that, there's the step 1 exam that will determine your life so you are studying for that too. If you haven't stopped going to the gym or eating healthy or cutting into your sleep, nows the ideal time.

Then year 3-4 comes and you are 6 figures in debt. You've probably either gained weight from stress eating, or lost weight from not eating. You also look like ****, like you've gained 20 years, from not going to the gym and not sleeping. You've lost all contact with non medicine friends and the only thing you talk about with your 'new' friends is medicine cause that's all you do during your waking hours. Year 3-4 can be better or worse depending on the student. You are now working 60-80 hours a week in the hospital + you are expected to study after work so you dont look stupid at work, and for the exams at the end of each rotation. It's usually now that med students realize how useless they are. You only get in the way of the residents/attendings. The nurses, and techs treat you like garbage and you may be asked to do scut work. On surgery for example, i got to the hospital at 330AM, and left at 7PM on average. Somehow after that i have to eat, read, and sleep. All i did during work was present patients before OR, then retract in the OR. The environment was pretty crappy cause no one was happy from being overworked. A good day is when you learn more than a couple of things. You start thinking if this is really a good use of 60k tuition a year. Then 4th year comes and you realize you have to make the life altering decision of which residency to apply to. If it's competitive, hopefully you were doing research on top of everything mentioned above. Either way now it's time to study for Step 2 CK and CS which costs 2k total and is a complete waste of time, but still very stressful.

Residency comes and you realize you made your decision of which residency to go into solely based on 1-2 months of rotation. You realize being a resident is nothing like being a med student. Hopefully you at least dont end up hating your choice. But you are still working 80 hours a week, now with more production pressure. Your decisions actually matter! You start making a salary and realize if you live frugal, you can cover the interest on your 200k+ loans. You are still low on the totem pole and the nurses are still rude to you. You are now 26-29 years old and the only thing you have to show for your lifelong work is your mountain of debt. You are still eating crap, barely sleeping, and barely working out. Your non med friends are already buying houses and getting married and having kids. You ask yourself again why you decided to go into your field and torture yourself. 3-8 years later you are jaded, you dont find things exciting anymore cause you are tired and you've seen them many times already. You aged 50 years and your joints hurt. You are still drowning in loans, and then you realize the jobs out there suck. You probably have to move across country again to find a decent job. Then you ask yourself if you should do a fellowship, and if you do hopefully you did some research in residency. Then finally when you are done at age 35, you realize you finally need to get your life on track. You may want kids, a house, start paying off those loans and maybe save for retirement.

TLDR
1) I think mainly because of the imbalance between reality vs expectations. People go into medicine expecting one thing then finding out its completely different. You work 80 hrs a week for 10 years after college in a high stake environment, it slowly eats at you and drains you down. You are often working weekends, and get maybe half the federal holidays off. (since hospitals are open 24/7). You are so tired you stop working out, and dont have time to sleep and eat well. When you applied to med school, you were young and energetic. You probably told yourself you can handle 80 hrs a week no problem. Then reality hits and you realize it sucks and you can't do this for 10 years straight. The loans are also way higher than expected cause pre meds probably didn't do the math or didn't know how it worked. Most patients also dont appreciate you. Even after the 10 year of post college training, the salary is lower than expected, people also get bothered by litigations, increased regulations and bureaucracies, lack of freedom to practice , etc. Basically a lot of things you didn't know when you were a pre med.

And it definitely depends on a persons personality. But thats not something that can be easily changed. I know people who LOVES to work and dont mind working 100 hours a week til retirement. Some people may also be bad with deaths, but other people may be able to bounce back in 2 minutes and move on. Everything matters. Other people may have outside things going on that only adds to the stress. It may drive them to depression even suicide.

You should post this in the pre-med forum. Pretty spot on. It probably won't do any good because, well, you remember how clueless you were, right? I know I do. I will say that it's awfully convenient that med school is designed to where, by the time you realize what a terrible idea this was, you're too deep in debt to back out. The sales pitch is great too--go be a doctor, save lives, be respected, chicks, money, power, chicks... And the school is all smiles when you go to interview. No one suspects the pit of misery and woe that it actually is. You really can't blame pre-meds for falling for it.

 

[anbuitachi]

You should post this in the pre-med forum. Pretty spot on. It probably won't do any good because, well, you remember how clueless you were, right? I know I do. I will say that it's awfully convenient that med school is designed to where, by the time you realize what a terrible idea this was, you're too deep in debt to back out. The sales pitch is great too--go be a doctor, save lives, be respected, chicks, money, power, chicks... And the school is all smiles when you go to interview. No one suspects the pit of misery and woe that it actually is. You really can't blame pre-meds for falling for it.

Yea it probably wont do any good. They'd probably also think im some pre med whos just trying to decrease competition so i can get into med school

 

[mistafab]

Sounds like you were miserable from start to finish.

Meanwhile, a quiet but substantial chunk of people like me are having a great time.

Any premeds reading this - if you are having a great time now, you can definitely have a great time in med school too. I’ve also met residents and attendings who are having a great time. We can make it brah! We everywhere! We real tea now!

It's complicated and many factors come into play. I think the most important reason is most pre meds do not know what they are getting into and/or do not know how the journey would affect them. They think they want to help people, maybe have seen some sick people suffer or family member suffer and therefore wanted to be a healer, or maybe they were interested in biology/science and that's why they decided to do medicine. (Big mistake for many people). After that, they have to work really hard since college (some even HS to get into as good a college as possible). In college they have to work hard to maintain a decent GPA, while doing extracurriculars/research to pad your resume. Senior year is spent filling out applications, writing essays, and going away for interviews. This takes away a lot of time from personal use starting from college. Many students spend their summers doing research, or studying for MCAT. Some even take gap year/years to boost their resume after college. I went to a ivy college, the recommended gpa is at least a 3.7 to have a good shot at getting into med school. (i believe it was 80% chance or so). A lot of people end up not making it (due to weed out classes) and change career paths in college.

Once the clueless pre med gets into med school, a whole new beast starts. You now officially a grown man/woman, but has zero power and is essentially everyones B****. Your existence is pretty meaningless to the hospital aside from the 60k tuition you pay to them per year. You get drowned in debt with interest that starts to grow from the day you take out the loan. You are spending all day/night memorizing useless information while your non med friends are making money and enjoying their best years. Especially in the beginning , it's not uncommon to get completely overwhelmed by the amount of information you have to know. A 6 month class in college is taught in 1-2 weeks in med school. (You also dont get the vacations that you get in college, like winter/summer/spring break) . You spend about 80 hrs a week studying. Then year 2 comes and you still studying for your classes, and on top of that, there's the step 1 exam that will determine your life so you are studying for that too. If you haven't stopped going to the gym or eating healthy or cutting into your sleep, nows the ideal time.

Then year 3-4 comes and you are 6 figures in debt. You've probably either gained weight from stress eating, or lost weight from not eating. You also look like ****, like you've gained 20 years, from not going to the gym and not sleeping. You've lost all contact with non medicine friends and the only thing you talk about with your 'new' friends is medicine cause that's all you do during your waking hours. Year 3-4 can be better or worse depending on the student. You are now working 60-80 hours a week in the hospital + you are expected to study after work so you dont look stupid at work, and for the exams at the end of each rotation. It's usually now that med students realize how useless they are. You only get in the way of the residents/attendings. The nurses, and techs treat you like garbage and you may be asked to do scut work. On surgery for example, i got to the hospital at 330AM, and left at 7PM on average. Somehow after that i have to eat, read, and sleep. All i did during work was present patients before OR, then retract in the OR. The environment was pretty crappy cause no one was happy from being overworked. A good day is when you learn more than a couple of things. You start thinking if this is really a good use of 60k tuition a year. Then 4th year comes and you realize you have to make the life altering decision of which residency to apply to. If it's competitive, hopefully you were doing research on top of everything mentioned above. Either way now it's time to study for Step 2 CK and CS which costs 2k total and is a complete waste of time, but still very stressful.

Residency comes and you realize you made your decision of which residency to go into solely based on 1-2 months of rotation. You realize being a resident is nothing like being a med student. Hopefully you at least dont end up hating your choice. But you are still working 80 hours a week, now with more production pressure. Your decisions actually matter! You start making a salary and realize if you live frugal, you can cover the interest on your 200k+ loans. You are still low on the totem pole and the nurses are still rude to you. You are now 26-29 years old and the only thing you have to show for your lifelong work is your mountain of debt. You are still eating crap, barely sleeping, and barely working out. Your non med friends are already buying houses and getting married and having kids. You ask yourself again why you decided to go into your field and torture yourself. 3-8 years later you are jaded, you dont find things exciting anymore cause you are tired and you've seen them many times already. You aged 50 years and your joints hurt. You are still drowning in loans, and then you realize the jobs out there suck. You probably have to move across country again to find a decent job. Then you ask yourself if you should do a fellowship, and if you do hopefully you did some research in residency. Then finally when you are done at age 35, you realize you finally need to get your life on track. You may want kids, a house, start paying off those loans and maybe save for retirement.

TLDR
1) I think mainly because of the imbalance between reality vs expectations. People go into medicine expecting one thing then finding out its completely different. You work 80 hrs a week for 10 years after college in a high stake environment, it slowly eats at you and drains you down. You are often working weekends, and get maybe half the federal holidays off. (since hospitals are open 24/7). You are so tired you stop working out, and dont have time to sleep and eat well. When you applied to med school, you were young and energetic. You probably told yourself you can handle 80 hrs a week no problem. Then reality hits and you realize it sucks and you can't do this for 10 years straight. The loans are also way higher than expected cause pre meds probably didn't do the math or didn't know how it worked. Most patients also dont appreciate you. Even after the 10 year of post college training, the salary is lower than expected, people also get bothered by litigations, increased regulations and bureaucracies, lack of freedom to practice , etc. Basically a lot of things you didn't know when you were a pre med.

And it definitely depends on a persons personality. But thats not something that can be easily changed. I know people who LOVES to work and dont mind working 100 hours a week til retirement. Some people may also be bad with deaths, but other people may be able to bounce back in 2 minutes and move on. Everything matters. Other people may have outside things going on that only adds to the stress. It may drive them to depression even suicide.

 

[zero0]

Sounds like you were miserable from start to finish.

Meanwhile, a quiet but substantial chunk of people like me are having a great time.

Any premeds reading this - if you are having a great time now, you can definitely have a great time in med school too. I’ve also met residents and attendings who are having a great time. We can make it brah! We everywhere! We real tea now!

Not sure what to make of this. Either literally insane or just trying to 1 up. It's SDN so I'll assume it's both.

 

[PhillyMed777]

Not sure what to make of this. Either literally insane or just trying to 1 up. It's SDN so I'll assume it's both.

I was someone who was miserable through the process
It wasn't until the last 1/2 of 4th year when i chilled out and saw how the people who enjoyed the process did things. Then i realized how they were doing it. Basically by not caring so much about the outcome and just getting things done. By not caring about the outcome (honoring, step, etc), you can prioritize friends and hobbies, and get by. Med schools want people to finish school, so failing out is quite difficult.
Sometimes, it is a school by school basis. There's no doubt some schools are just more toxic and make things more difficult than others.

 

[NeurologyHopeful2018]

Sounds like you were miserable from start to finish.

Meanwhile, a quiet but substantial chunk of people like me are having a great time.

Any premeds reading this - if you are having a great time now, you can definitely have a great time in med school too. I’ve also met residents and attendings who are having a great time. We can make it brah! We everywhere! We real tea now!

You must be even more miserable deep down inside having to force yourself putting on such fake act.

I remember how we learned to fake enthusiasm while praying to be sent home..

 

[anbuitachi]

Sounds like you were miserable from start to finish.

Meanwhile, a quiet but substantial chunk of people like me are having a great time.

Any premeds reading this - if you are having a great time now, you can definitely have a great time in med school too. I’ve also met residents and attendings who are having a great time. We can make it brah! We everywhere! We real tea now!

yea but where are you in the process. how many years do you have left until you become an attending?

 

[appalachian_man]

Ah yes, this is the SDN I've come to know and love. Where people will argue for days about whether or not it's possible to be happy in medicine, and if you say you're happy, then you're wrong and that's final

No wonder all the cool kids went to reddit

 

[It's lupus!]

Just an observation... Why if medicine makes you miserable would you spend any extra time on a medical forum dwelling on it? It just seems strange. No judgement for doing it, but something seems off about this

Sent from my Pixel XL using SDN mobile

 

[PhillyMed777]

Why if medicine makes you miserable would you spend any extra time on a medical forum dwelling on it?

At least from my perspective when I was miserable, I often had no one willing to continuously hear me out. I guess it's a lot to ask from people. Even if they listen, if they arn't in medicine they don't understand. These people are looking for ears to listen.

 

[It's lupus!]

At least from my perspective when I was miserable, I often had no one willing to continuously hear me out. I guess it's a lot to ask from people. Even if they listen, if they arn't in medicine they don't understand. These people are looking for ears to listen.

That's a fair way of putting it

Sent from my Pixel XL using SDN mobile

 

[mistafab]

This is the saddest post on this thread dude. I’m rooting for you.

You have to truly be miserable to be so cynical and disheartened that you literally can’t even see how someone can be enjoying themselves lol.

Sadly, there is a substantial (and quite vocal) chunk of people that rarely feel good. Not just in medicine, but in life in general. These are the people that refuse to enjoy themselves. The crowd that talks to you about traffic, lines at the grocery store, and slow service at restaurants. “Why me?” is like a mentality.

Meanwhile, I don’t have a job. I show up to the hospital and see people’s guts and stuff and I get to help put it back together. I change a dressing and “poof” a person looks me in the eyes and is like “thank you omg you are doing god’s work #blessed” lol. I work out. I chill w/ my GF and watch TV. This is the life bro. Meanwhile some old friends and I text here and there, and maybe get a GIF or two that makes us lol at random times. Some friends here and I go out for drinks here and there or we meet up to study. Chat it up with the fam on the phone every week, just chilling no pressure. Things always looking up dude.

How can this not be the life? I’m 26 years into this game, and so far - what a journey brev.

We’re all gonna make it. Even you bro. One day you’ll find something that’ll wake you.

You must be even more miserable deep down inside having to force yourself putting on such fake act.

I remember how we learned to fake enthusiasm while praying to be sent home..

 

[zero0]

I was someone who was miserable through the process
It wasn't until the last 1/2 of 4th year when i chilled out and saw how the people who enjoyed the process did things. Then i realized how they were doing it. Basically by not caring so much about the outcome and just getting things done. By not caring about the outcome (honoring, step, etc), you can prioritize friends and hobbies, and get by. Med schools want people to finish school, so failing out is quite difficult.
Sometimes, it is a school by school basis. There's no doubt some schools are just more toxic and make things more difficult than others.

There's definitely something to this but easier said than done when I'm in the middle of dedicated and 5 weeks away from the most important exam of my life. Ugh

 

[atomi]

TLDR
1) I think mainly because of the imbalance between reality vs expectations. People go into medicine expecting one thing then finding out its completely different. You work 80 hrs a week for 10 years after college in a high stake environment, it slowly eats at you and drains you down. You are often working weekends, and get maybe half the federal holidays off. (since hospitals are open 24/7). You are so tired you stop working out, and dont have time to sleep and eat well. When you applied to med school, you were young and energetic. You probably told yourself you can handle 80 hrs a week no problem. Then reality hits and you realize it sucks and you can't do this for 10 years straight. The loans are also way higher than expected cause pre meds probably didn't do the math or didn't know how it worked. Most patients also dont appreciate you. Even after the 10 year of post college training, the salary is lower than expected, people also get bothered by litigations, increased regulations and bureaucracies, lack of freedom to practice , etc. Basically a lot of things you didn't know when you were a pre med.

And it definitely depends on a persons personality. But thats not something that can be easily changed. I know people who LOVES to work and dont mind working 100 hours a week til retirement. Some people may also be bad with deaths, but other people may be able to bounce back in 2 minutes and move on. Everything matters. Other people may have outside things going on that only adds to the stress. It may drive them to depression even suicide.

Stop with the hyperbole. You are not "working" 80/hrs week in med school. Quality of life in med school is for the most part alright. I had time to keep a side business going that paid my expenses and still had downtime. Most people in the world have it way worse. The salaries I have been offered are much higher than I expected starting med school, with some offers including loan repayment. If you chose to borrow $400k to go into primary care in a large coastal city, that's on you. There are plenty of rewarding careers in medicine that don't lead to "depression and suicide." Get a grip.

 

[anbuitachi]

Stop with the hyperbole. You are not "working" 80/hrs week in med school. Quality of life in med school is for the most part alright. I had time to keep a side business going that paid my expenses and still had downtime. Most people in the world have it way worse. The salaries I have been offered are much higher than I expected starting med school, with some offers including loan repayment. If you chose to borrow $400k to go into primary care in a large coastal city, that's on you. There are plenty of rewarding careers in medicine that don't lead to "depression and suicide." Get a grip.

Sorry i guess there are people dying in wars right now. its all about perspective. oops

 

[Candidate2017]

It's complicated and many factors come into play. I think the most important reason is most pre meds do not know what they are getting into and/or do not know how the journey would affect them. They think they want to help people, maybe have seen some sick people suffer or family member suffer and therefore wanted to be a healer, or maybe they were interested in biology/science and that's why they decided to do medicine. (Big mistake for many people). After that, they have to work really hard since college (some even HS to get into as good a college as possible). In college they have to work hard to maintain a decent GPA, while doing extracurriculars/research to pad your resume. Senior year is spent filling out applications, writing essays, and going away for interviews. This takes away a lot of time from personal use starting from college. Many students spend their summers doing research, or studying for MCAT. Some even take gap year/years to boost their resume after college. I went to a ivy college, the recommended gpa is at least a 3.7 to have a good shot at getting into med school. (i believe it was 80% chance or so). A lot of people end up not making it (due to weed out classes) and change career paths in college.

Once the clueless pre med gets into med school, a whole new beast starts. You now officially a grown man/woman, but has zero power and is essentially everyones B****. Your existence is pretty meaningless to the hospital aside from the 60k tuition you pay to them per year. You get drowned in debt with interest that starts to grow from the day you take out the loan. You are spending all day/night memorizing useless information while your non med friends are making money and enjoying their best years. Especially in the beginning , it's not uncommon to get completely overwhelmed by the amount of information you have to know. A 6 month class in college is taught in 1-2 weeks in med school. (You also dont get the vacations that you get in college, like winter/summer/spring break) . You spend about 80 hrs a week studying. Then year 2 comes and you still studying for your classes, and on top of that, there's the step 1 exam that will determine your life so you are studying for that too. If you haven't stopped going to the gym or eating healthy or cutting into your sleep, nows the ideal time.

Then year 3-4 comes and you are 6 figures in debt. You've probably either gained weight from stress eating, or lost weight from not eating. You also look like ****, like you've gained 20 years, from not going to the gym and not sleeping. You've lost all contact with non medicine friends and the only thing you talk about with your 'new' friends is medicine cause that's all you do during your waking hours. Year 3-4 can be better or worse depending on the student. You are now working 60-80 hours a week in the hospital + you are expected to study after work so you dont look stupid at work, and for the exams at the end of each rotation. It's usually now that med students realize how useless they are. You only get in the way of the residents/attendings. The nurses, and techs treat you like garbage and you may be asked to do scut work. On surgery for example, i got to the hospital at 330AM, and left at 7PM on average. Somehow after that i have to eat, read, and sleep. All i did during work was present patients before OR, then retract in the OR. The environment was pretty crappy cause no one was happy from being overworked. A good day is when you learn more than a couple of things. You start thinking if this is really a good use of 60k tuition a year. Then 4th year comes and you realize you have to make the life altering decision of which residency to apply to. If it's competitive, hopefully you were doing research on top of everything mentioned above. Either way now it's time to study for Step 2 CK and CS which costs 2k total and is a complete waste of time, but still very stressful.

Residency comes and you realize you made your decision of which residency to go into solely based on 1-2 months of rotation. You realize being a resident is nothing like being a med student. Hopefully you at least dont end up hating your choice. But you are still working 80 hours a week, now with more production pressure. Your decisions actually matter! You start making a salary and realize if you live frugal, you can cover the interest on your 200k+ loans. You are still low on the totem pole and the nurses are still rude to you. You are now 26-29 years old and the only thing you have to show for your lifelong work is your mountain of debt. You are still eating crap, barely sleeping, and barely working out. Your non med friends are already buying houses and getting married and having kids. You ask yourself again why you decided to go into your field and torture yourself. 3-8 years later you are jaded, you dont find things exciting anymore cause you are tired and you've seen them many times already. You aged 50 years and your joints hurt. You are still drowning in loans, and then you realize the jobs out there suck. You probably have to move across country again to find a decent job. Then you ask yourself if you should do a fellowship, and if you do hopefully you did some research in residency. Then finally when you are done at age 35, you realize you finally need to get your life on track. You may want kids, a house, start paying off those loans and maybe save for retirement.

TLDR
1) I think mainly because of the imbalance between reality vs expectations. People go into medicine expecting one thing then finding out its completely different. You work 80 hrs a week for 10 years after college in a high stake environment, it slowly eats at you and drains you down. You are often working weekends, and get maybe half the federal holidays off. (since hospitals are open 24/7). You are so tired you stop working out, and dont have time to sleep and eat well. When you applied to med school, you were young and energetic. You probably told yourself you can handle 80 hrs a week no problem. Then reality hits and you realize it sucks and you can't do this for 10 years straight. The loans are also way higher than expected cause pre meds probably didn't do the math or didn't know how it worked. Most patients also dont appreciate you. Even after the 10 year of post college training, the salary is lower than expected, people also get bothered by litigations, increased regulations and bureaucracies, lack of freedom to practice , etc. Basically a lot of things you didn't know when you were a pre med.

And it definitely depends on a persons personality. But thats not something that can be easily changed. I know people who LOVES to work and dont mind working 100 hours a week til retirement. Some people may also be bad with deaths, but other people may be able to bounce back in 2 minutes and move on. Everything matters. Other people may have outside things going on that only adds to the stress. It may drive them to depression even suicide.

There are many paths in medicine. What you describe is the type A, gunner path: chasing class rank, honors, scores, specialties based on money/difficulty of entry/perceived bad-assedness. But it's not the only path.

 

[anbuitachi]

There are many paths in medicine. What you describe is the type A, gunner path: chasing class rank, honors, scores, specialties based on money/difficulty of entry/perceived bad-assedness. But it's not the only path.

Well I can tell you I did not care about ranks or honors. And I am currently in a lowly respected thats easy to get into residency with slightly above average pay.

 

[resiroth]

Well I can tell you I did not care about ranks or honors. And I am currently in a lowly respected thats easy to get into residency with slightly above average pay.

Bruh anesthesiologists make literally double pediatricians. Double. The “low end” of 300k is literally 5x the median household income for the United States. People think “we’ll im not a neurosurgeon so I don’t get respect”. Well, what about radiologists? Pathologists? PM&R? Family medicine? Pediatricians? Rheumatologist? Dermatologist? I don’t see the public in awe of family medicine doctors more than anesthesiologists, and I don’t see medical professionals doing so either.

For some reason the medical field is very “woe is me” but also “dermatologists only make wet things dry, dry things wet. Ortho surgeons are idiots. Radiologists are antisocial dweebs” it’s really toxic, but thankfully it’s mostly confined to the internet.

I can honestly say there are really only two fields that make me kind of jealous.

1: private equity, gobs of cash, nuff said.

2: programming in Silicon Valley.

Even then you can write about those jobs in the same way.

“Private equity is horrible, you don’t even end up helping people and all you do is make rich people richer and skim some off the top for yourself. Hours are crazy long before you actually can get into private equity, and you have to network and be friends with total dinguses or you literally lose your job. Finally the public nearly universally hates you and everything you stand for as a member of the 1% that serves primarily to enrich themselves and their 0.01% masters.”

“Programming is great...if you dreamed of staring at a computer all day and never accomplishing anything that meant anything to anyone. Today I made some tweaks to some legacy inventory management software that will be unused in a few years anyway as the cost of using old machines finally becomes more than the cost of paying me to continue to keep them on life support. I thought I’d be working on like self driving cars or some **** but instead it’s literally office space tier bull****. Oh and my pay is actually pretty good, 150k! The only issue is to actually make money in this industry you’re forced to live in California (30-40% taxes here we come) and houses near work cost 3 million dollars for a 3 bedroom 2 bath. Want to work anywhere else? Enjoy a 50% reduction in pay. Oh and by the way it’s fun working at a company that’s hip and cool when you’re young hip and cool. You know what happens when you get old? You get fired. You have to constantly keep up with new languages. This isn’t some new guideline released every few years, this is a new way of doing everything. Don’t want to keep up? Good luck finding a job except for updating legacy inventory and banking software in some dusty office cubicles.”

So yeah, if you have a toxic and negative outlook you can make anything look bad. If you focus on the good you can make almost anything look good. It’s up to you to decide your reaction, since the world is going to be the same regardless.

 

[anbuitachi]

Bruh anesthesiologists make literally double pediatricians. Double. The “low end” of 300k is literally 5x the median household income for the United States. People think “we’ll im not a neurosurgeon so I don’t get respect”. Well, what about radiologists? Pathologists? PM&R? Family medicine? Pediatricians? Rheumatologist? Dermatologist? I don’t see the public in awe of family medicine doctors more than anesthesiologists, and I don’t see medical professionals doing so either.

For some reason the medical field is very “woe is me” but also “dermatologists only make wet things dry, dry things wet. Ortho surgeons are idiots. Radiologists are antisocial dweebs” it’s really toxic, but thankfully it’s mostly confined to the internet.

I can honestly say there are really only two fields that make me kind of jealous.

1: private equity, gobs of cash, nuff said.

2: programming in Silicon Valley.

Even then you can write about those jobs in the same way.

“Private equity is horrible, you don’t even end up helping people and all you do is make rich people richer and skim some off the top for yourself. Hours are crazy long before you actually can get into private equity, and you have to network and be friends with total dinguses or you literally lose your job. Finally the public nearly universally hates you and everything you stand for as a member of the 1% that serves primarily to enrich themselves and their 0.01% masters.”

“Programming is great...if you dreamed of staring at a computer all day and never accomplishing anything that meant anything to anyone. Today I made some tweaks to some legacy inventory management software that will be unused in a few years anyway as the cost of using old machines finally becomes more than the cost of paying me to continue to keep them on life support. I thought I’d be working on like self driving cars or some **** but instead it’s literally office space tier bull****. Oh and my pay is actually pretty good, 150k! The only issue is to actually make money in this industry you’re forced to live in California (30-40% taxes here we come) and houses near work cost 3 million dollars for a 3 bedroom 2 bath. Want to work anywhere else? Enjoy a 50% reduction in pay. Oh and by the way it’s fun working at a company that’s hip and cool when you’re young hip and cool. You know what happens when you get old? You get fired. You have to constantly keep up with new languages. This isn’t some new guideline released every few years, this is a new way of doing everything. Don’t want to keep up? Good luck finding a job except for updating legacy inventory and banking software in some dusty office cubicles.”

So yeah, if you have a toxic and negative outlook you can make anything look bad. If you focus on the good you can make almost anything look good. It’s up to you to decide your reaction, since the world is going to be the same regardless.

Yea bruh. That's why I said above average. Comparing the bottom to the average is a big difference. And Anes is one of the least respected fields in medicine. Even nurses look down on you probably cause no one knows what you do

 

[Iz_FtB]

Christ, the doom and gloom is off the charts here.

Everyone is entitled to their own feelings. If anyone is committed to looking at medical school and residency and seeing a gulag, by all means go ahead. Just don't be surprised when people with positive attitudes decide that outlook on life life is exhausting and want nothing to do with the promulgators.

The school one attends has a big effect on the experience of med school. Some schools can make the process harder than it needs to be. Others can make it a pleasure, and I'm fortunate to have landed in the latter. Having said that, I am a career changer and older than my classmates. Med school has been an absolute vacation compared to the unrelenting nonsense that exists on the outside. I'm glad I'm here and doing what I am doing, and many of my classmates feel the same way.

So that I'm not completely derailing the thread, does anyone attend a school that provides salary data? We've had a few career talks and average salary comes up, but the source is never there and there is no resolution in the data. It seems like a reasonable piece of information to pass on to students as they mull their specialty choice.

 

[hallowmann]

Yea bruh. That's why I said above average. Comparing the bottom to the average is a big difference. And Anes is one of the least respected fields in medicine. Even nurses look down on you probably cause no one knows what you do

To be fair, every field thinks they're the least respected. Talk to the PM&R or FM doc about how much "respect" they have in their field. EM, Psych, etc, all have their baggage. Some nurses look down on everyone...

 

[LebronManning]

To be fair, every field thinks they're the least respected. Talk to the PM&R or FM doc about how much "respect" they have in their field. EM, Psych, etc, all have their baggage. Some nurses look down on everyone...

I don’t think neurosurgeons, heart surgeons, or cardiologists think this

 

[hallowmann]

I don’t think neurosurgeons, heart surgeons, or cardiologists think this

I don't know about that. I have some NSG and Cards friends that make statements like that. You'd be surprised. Grass is always greener and all that. You also have to realize that people base things off of their experiences and people rarely have real experience in more than 1 or 2 specialties. What might seem like "no respect" to one specialty is very different in another.

*I don't know CT surgeons outside of work, so no anecdotes there.

 

[ILikeFood]

It's complicated and many factors come into play. I think the most important reason is most pre meds do not know what they are getting into and/or do not know how the journey would affect them. They think they want to help people, maybe have seen some sick people suffer or family member suffer and therefore wanted to be a healer, or maybe they were interested in biology/science and that's why they decided to do medicine. (Big mistake for many people). After that, they have to work really hard since college (some even HS to get into as good a college as possible). In college they have to work hard to maintain a decent GPA, while doing extracurriculars/research to pad your resume. Senior year is spent filling out applications, writing essays, and going away for interviews. This takes away a lot of time from personal use starting from college. Many students spend their summers doing research, or studying for MCAT. Some even take gap year/years to boost their resume after college. I went to a ivy college, the recommended gpa is at least a 3.7 to have a good shot at getting into med school. (i believe it was 80% chance or so). A lot of people end up not making it (due to weed out classes) and change career paths in college.

Once the clueless pre med gets into med school, a whole new beast starts. You now officially a grown man/woman, but has zero power and is essentially everyones B****. Your existence is pretty meaningless to the hospital aside from the 60k tuition you pay to them per year. You get drowned in debt with interest that starts to grow from the day you take out the loan. You are spending all day/night memorizing useless information while your non med friends are making money and enjoying their best years. Especially in the beginning , it's not uncommon to get completely overwhelmed by the amount of information you have to know. A 6 month class in college is taught in 1-2 weeks in med school. (You also dont get the vacations that you get in college, like winter/summer/spring break) . You spend about 80 hrs a week studying. Then year 2 comes and you still studying for your classes, and on top of that, there's the step 1 exam that will determine your life so you are studying for that too. If you haven't stopped going to the gym or eating healthy or cutting into your sleep, nows the ideal time.

Then year 3-4 comes and you are 6 figures in debt. You've probably either gained weight from stress eating, or lost weight from not eating. You also look like ****, like you've gained 20 years, from not going to the gym and not sleeping. You've lost all contact with non medicine friends and the only thing you talk about with your 'new' friends is medicine cause that's all you do during your waking hours. Year 3-4 can be better or worse depending on the student. You are now working 60-80 hours a week in the hospital + you are expected to study after work so you dont look stupid at work, and for the exams at the end of each rotation. It's usually now that med students realize how useless they are. You only get in the way of the residents/attendings. The nurses, and techs treat you like garbage and you may be asked to do scut work. On surgery for example, i got to the hospital at 330AM, and left at 7PM on average. Somehow after that i have to eat, read, and sleep. All i did during work was present patients before OR, then retract in the OR. The environment was pretty crappy cause no one was happy from being overworked. A good day is when you learn more than a couple of things. You start thinking if this is really a good use of 60k tuition a year. Then 4th year comes and you realize you have to make the life altering decision of which residency to apply to. If it's competitive, hopefully you were doing research on top of everything mentioned above. Either way now it's time to study for Step 2 CK and CS which costs 2k total and is a complete waste of time, but still very stressful.

Residency comes and you realize you made your decision of which residency to go into solely based on 1-2 months of rotation. You realize being a resident is nothing like being a med student. Hopefully you at least dont end up hating your choice. But you are still working 80 hours a week, now with more production pressure. Your decisions actually matter! You start making a salary and realize if you live frugal, you can cover the interest on your 200k+ loans. You are still low on the totem pole and the nurses are still rude to you. You are now 26-29 years old and the only thing you have to show for your lifelong work is your mountain of debt. You are still eating crap, barely sleeping, and barely working out. Your non med friends are already buying houses and getting married and having kids. You ask yourself again why you decided to go into your field and torture yourself. 3-8 years later you are jaded, you dont find things exciting anymore cause you are tired and you've seen them many times already. You aged 50 years and your joints hurt. You are still drowning in loans, and then you realize the jobs out there suck. You probably have to move across country again to find a decent job. Then you ask yourself if you should do a fellowship, and if you do hopefully you did some research in residency. Then finally when you are done at age 35, you realize you finally need to get your life on track. You may want kids, a house, start paying off those loans and maybe save for retirement.

TLDR
1) I think mainly because of the imbalance between reality vs expectations. People go into medicine expecting one thing then finding out its completely different. You work 80 hrs a week for 10 years after college in a high stake environment, it slowly eats at you and drains you down. You are often working weekends, and get maybe half the federal holidays off. (since hospitals are open 24/7). You are so tired you stop working out, and dont have time to sleep and eat well. When you applied to med school, you were young and energetic. You probably told yourself you can handle 80 hrs a week no problem. Then reality hits and you realize it sucks and you can't do this for 10 years straight. The loans are also way higher than expected cause pre meds probably didn't do the math or didn't know how it worked. Most patients also dont appreciate you. Even after the 10 year of post college training, the salary is lower than expected, people also get bothered by litigations, increased regulations and bureaucracies, lack of freedom to practice , etc. Basically a lot of things you didn't know when you were a pre med.

And it definitely depends on a persons personality. But thats not something that can be easily changed. I know people who LOVES to work and dont mind working 100 hours a week til retirement. Some people may also be bad with deaths, but other people may be able to bounce back in 2 minutes and move on. Everything matters. Other people may have outside things going on that only adds to the stress. It may drive them to depression even suicide.

There's a lot of truth to this, especially since I finished residency at 35. I was definitely more tired than I expected to be when I finished training and part of the battle post-residency is finding the energy to live a life outside of work again. I found a great job that is mostly interesting and isn't too stressful. I'm earning a good salary. The first year out of residency, I helped my brother with a downpayment on a house and managed to pay off the $80,000 in interest that's accumulated on my loans over the last several years. Now the battle is getting myself to the gym, to the spa, to the gathering at a friend's home, dating, learning the little skills that will make my life better. Personal life is still a little lacking still but professional life is definitely money, respect, prestige. Like my job, however would not go down this route if given the choice again. Anyway just a personal opinion, there are definitely people who do great throughout the process and all the more power to them.

 

[anbuitachi]

To be fair, every field thinks they're the least respected. Talk to the PM&R or FM doc about how much "respect" they have in their field. EM, Psych, etc, all have their baggage. Some nurses look down on everyone...

Really? Do you really know any Nsg, or CT surgeon who think they are less respected than the anesthesiologist in their surgery, or the ED doctor that sent them the patient?

Christ, the doom and gloom is off the charts here.

Everyone is entitled to their own feelings. If anyone is committed to looking at medical school and residency and seeing a gulag, by all means go ahead. Just don't be surprised when people with positive attitudes decide that outlook on life life is exhausting and want nothing to do with the promulgators.

The school one attends has a big effect on the experience of med school. Some schools can make the process harder than it needs to be. Others can make it a pleasure, and I'm fortunate to have landed in the latter. Having said that, I am a career changer and older than my classmates. Med school has been an absolute vacation compared to the unrelenting nonsense that exists on the outside. I'm glad I'm here and doing what I am doing, and many of my classmates feel the same way.

So that I'm not completely derailing the thread, does anyone attend a school that provides salary data? We've had a few career talks and average salary comes up, but the source is never there and there is no resolution in the data. It seems like a reasonable piece of information to pass on to students as they mull their specialty choice.

All you got are surveys and it's going to vary depending on how many people respond, and who responds. So definitely take everything with a grain of salt.. How likely are doctors who are very busy even going to respond to the surveys? There may be selection bias to this as well. But with that said medscape is a good free source i think. I think its probably fairly accurate for employee positions like EM, rads, anes since they get a 'set salary' from the hospital. Other fields can vary a lot since they open their own practices.

But in the end i think the true measurement is how much you make per hour. A ED doctor making 400k working 40 hrs a week is not the same as a IM doctor making 400k working 80 hrs a week..

 

[resiroth]

Really? Do you really know any Nsg, or CT surgeon who think they are less respected than the anesthesiologist in their surgery, or the ED doctor that sent them the patient?



All you got are surveys and it's going to vary depending on how many people respond, and who responds. So definitely take everything with a grain of salt.. How likely are doctors who are very busy even going to respond to the surveys? There may be selection bias to this as well. But with that said medscape is a good free source i think. I think its probably fairly accurate for employee positions like EM, rads, anes since they get a 'set salary' from the hospital. Other fields can vary a lot since they open their own practices.

But in the end i think the true measurement is how much you make per hour. A ED doctor making 400k working 40 hrs a week is not the same as a IM doctor making 400k working 80 hrs a week..

People's perceptions of their life circumstances often have 0 correlation to reality. Some people can be a real sour puss/totally oblivious, mostly for psychological (and personality) reasons. Ortho and plastics are paid the most out of all the fields in medicine, and yet only half feel fairly compensated (far below average). Guess who feels like they're fairly compensated at 69%? Public health and preventative medicine. The lowest paid field.

The hedonic treadmill and "happiness set point" is the reason someone like you will be complaining about only making 300-400k and being asked to push a button and raise a table up while some guy who just had his legs blown off overseas will be happy he can see his wife and dog again.

Honestly it's not a criticism of you as a person, I was just as negative at one point and still try to fight that tendency on occasion to catastrophize about stuff that doesn't matter in the end. If 98-99% of the population swapped lives with us they would be ecstatic. Worth keeping in mind imo.

 

[W19]

IM docs should be at the top of that list for how hard they work... Just putting that out there.

 

[Dox4lyfe]

IM docs should be at the top of that list for how hard they work... Just putting that out there.

But in life you don't get paid based on the amount of effort you put in do you...

 

[doyouhaveaflag]

IM docs should be at the top of that list for how hard they work... Just putting that out there.

Hmmm...I think you'd have trouble convincing a lot of people that they're the hardest working specialty.

Hey, what happened to your hell on earth thread?

 

[W19]

Hmmm...I think you'd have trouble convincing a lot of people that they're the hardest working specialty.

Hey, what happened to your hell on earth thread?

I deleted it...