I just graduated pharmacy school and I'm completing a year of pharmacy residency. For some reason, when I woke up this morning, I decided that I wanted to go to medical school. I'm 28 years old and I owe $160k in student loan debt. Please tell me I'm crazy to be considering going back to school.
I'd say you're maybe insane.
I'm sure you chose pharmacy for a reason. It's intellectually stimulating, you can work in both outpatient and/or inpatient settings, you're a valuable member of a medical team, you have a lot of interaction with nurses and physicians. Some specialized areas let you work on really sick patients and you get to help make management decisions with an interdisciplinary team. You can segway your career into policy, consulting, med business, pharm industry just like any physician.
It is definitely a different field from medicine. You don't have the diagnostic skills that a physician has. You don't have as much one-on-one patient interaction at the same intensity as the physician-patient relationship.
But, I wouldn't necessarily get caught up in the "grass is always greener" thinking.
You're 28. You'll be 29 or 30 by the time you start medical school if you start thinking about applying now.
Say, 34 by the time your finish medical school.
Say 37-40 by the time you finish residency and/or fellowship.
I'm an MS4 (and 27). I think medicine is a great career. The downside is that the training is very long (and, for the most part, justifiably so). The path is also not easy. Medical school isn't terrible...at most schools your schedule during the first 2 years is mostly more flexible than working a normal job in the real world. MS3 craziness is a whole other story though. However, muçh of residency is working 80 hr weeks at minimal pay for your effort, not seeing your family, constantly being overwhelmed, and working odd hours, night shifts, doing a lot of the "b*tch work none of the attendings on your service want to do anymore. You'll also incur a vast amount of debt in this period. In your case that's 7-10 years of missed pharmacist salary in addition to medical school debt that will not be substantially offset by the small salary you earn as a resident (especially in comparison to a practicing pharmacist)
Whenever I talk to someone (particularly older applicants) about applying to medical school, I try and emphasize the length of this path. You REALLY have to love medicine and think it is your calling to go down it later in life. If you really wanna see patients in a more diagnostic sense than a pharmacist, there are other, much less time intensive tracks (i.e. physician assistant), that in today's healthcare system let you do much of what a physician does, at good pay, with much, much less training.
In other words, I'd definitely recommend...sitting down, thinking about what sort of commitment this is (financial, family, physical, emotional, and TIME) and thinking about how badly you want this and why being a pharmacist or other sort of healthcare worker isn't going to give you what you want out of your career.
