Research vs. Medicine

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DifferentialDiagnosis

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Why did you choose one or the other?

I'm passionate about both, however I don't idolize a career in medicine like most do. I realize the pay sucks (until you become and attending), the hours are long, the education leaves you with thousands of dollars in loans and for a great part of your career you'll be stuck looking at moles and telling people they have UTIs or diagnosing STDS. Hardly a life of prestige and glory as some may think.

So why did you choose medicine over becoming a researcher (pay still isn't great and hours are long but you get paid right out of college and can leave your work behind, go home and not worry if you killed someone)?
 
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Why don't you just do both?

But to answer your question: for many it's money, ease of finding a job and prestige.
 
Medicine is a long, hard journey but those with a genuine interest in medicine look at it as a worthwhile investment of time, energy and money. At the end of your long road, you're rewarded with money and prestige, but more importantly, the knowledge of alleviating the physical suffering of people. You don't have to idolize medicine to recognize that this is a great privilege.
 
Why did you choose one or the other?

I'm passionate about both, however I don't idolize a career in medicine like most do. I realize the pay sucks (until you become and attending), the hours are long, the education leaves you with thousands of dollars in loans and for a great part of your career you'll be stuck looking at moles and telling people they have UTIs or diagnosing STDS. Hardly a life of prestige and glory as some may think.

So why did you choose medicine over becoming a researcher (pay still isn't great and hours are long but you get paid right out of college and can leave your work behind, go home and not worry if you killed someone)?

1) The human body and it's virtually endless presentations of disease, damage, and challenge extend far beyond UTIs and syphilis.

2) It's not like having your PhD guarantees you a career, especially immediately post graduation. You'll need to do a post-doc, which will tack on another 2-4/5 years. In fact, the post-doc in my lab has told me the Bio/life sciences PhD world has become so saturated, it is not uncommon for people who want academic positions to then do a second post-doc. Said post-doc is now nearing the end of her stint, and is struggling to find a teaching position.

Personally, medicine for me is a career that will provide both occupational and financial stability, cognitive challenges, and an opportunity to "do good"--through treating patients and--for those of us interested in academics--an opportunity to teach and impact students, residents, etc. In addition, if I desire, I can perform research as well. I'm a little weary of bench research at the moment, so I'm leaning more towards clinical research, as I've also had positive experiences there.

Edit: Removed salary portion of comment.
 
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Most people that want to go into medicine probably don't realize the amount of "routine" they will see until they're too far into training, and they've already decided that research isn't for them. Also, many people that wish to go into medicine have some sort of vision about what they see themselves doing ("I'm going to be a heart surgeon!"; I'm going to be a Dermatologist!") They may realize that they'll see boring things, but at that point, with not a ton of experience, the thought is often manifested as, "I'll deal with the boring stuff, because I'll also get to do major, life-changing things!" And they're not necessarily wrong. But realize that everybody has a different price, you don't only do UTIs/mole checks.

Additionally, what do you think researchers do? Discover cancer in a day? Work short hours? Get tons of money? Get a job immediately at the NIH? You write grants, manage a lab, think of experiments not just from a science standpoint, but from an economic, publishable, get-you-somewhere way. You wait hours for results that come back inconclusive. You screw up experiments and sit in a chair thinking about what the hell you're missing in your design. People beat you to it, you start over, you spend years waiting for something huge, and in the meantime, focus on the step-by-step. Yes, there's variation, but by and large, please realize that research is also extremely routine in terms of process, and perhaps even more frustrating in that you often have no precedents to tell you whether the weird results you got were outliers, or probably significant. Thus, you choose which way to go, and after a lot of time spent, may realize that you chose to go in the wrong direction.

Researchers do take their work home with them. If they badly need funding, or have just wasted money on a process that actually doesn't do anything, or if they're losing people in the lab, or if they wish the manuscript was higher impact, or awake in the middle of the night wondering if the extremely expensive dyes they got were accidentally left in the light for 12 hours, they're going to experience stress. It doesn't magically stop at the door because the job is different. There are different things that cause stress, and sure, objectively, killing somebody vs losing product are not the same, but as a researcher who's never killed anybody, what baseline do you have, from personal experience, to say that your own woes don't skyrocket your BP or cause depression and severe anxiety?

Plus, "routine" is different for many people. After a while, you'd be surprised at how nice "routine" is, after you've dealt with a number of doozies, and/or just don't have the energy/crazy passion that you had as a doe-eyed premedical student.

Prestige means different things to different people. Physicians who catch something routine that presented in unorthodox ways can feel pretty damn good about themselves, perhaps more than a guy who discovered a new gene in drosophila that discusses their wings. Similarly, if that research has ways to translate that into practical use, they can also feel damn good, more than a physician who spent the entire day ordering A1Cs and signing insurance forms.

What your work means to you is more important than the purely general, objective action that others may judge.
 
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It's not a binary choice and presenting it as such is misleading. A full time medicine career, as I see it, is absolutely nothing at all like a full time research career and both are different from a career as a physician scientist (provided one does not do an MD/PhD or a post doc or something similar and then end up in full research or full clinical) and even within each category there are multiple paths to take that may suit different people better than others.

I don't even understand the question, really.
 
1) The human body and it's virtually endless presentations of disease, damage, and challenge extend far beyond UTIs and syphilis.

2) It's not like having your PhD guarantees you a career, especially immediately post graduation. You'll need to do a post-doc, which will tack on another 2-4/5 years. In fact, the post-doc in my lab has told me the Bio/life sciences PhD world has become so saturated, it is not uncommon for people who want academic positions to then do a second post-doc. Oh, and she makes about~25k a year as a post-doc. Said post-doc is now nearing the end of her stint, and is struggling to find a teaching position.

Personally, medicine for me is a career that will provide both occupational and financial stability, cognitive challenges, and an opportunity to "do good"--through treating patients and--for those of us interested in academics--an opportunity to teach and impact students, residents, etc. In addition, if I desire, I can perform research as well. I'm a little weary of bench research at the moment, so I'm leaning more towards clinical research, as I've also had positive experiences there.

😵 Don't go talking crazy...no full time post doc (in science) makes that little. 😛 A graduate student makes ~24k minimum...a post doc makes ~39k minimum and it goes up each year until the max is reached.
 
😵 Don't go talking crazy...no full time post doc (in science) makes that little. 😛 A graduate student makes ~24k minimum...a post doc makes ~39k minimum and it goes up each year until the max is reached.

Just telling you what she told me. I could be off by a little, but we also live in a very low COL area, so that may factor into it.
 
Just telling you what she told me. I could be off by a little, but we also live in a very low COL area, so that may factor into it.
She's leaving something out then. Location only makes a couple k difference. Just had this convo and for 2014 the NIH guideline for postdocs is 42k. So I low balled it the first time as i remembered it back then... My sources say even grad funding is up from 24k. I'm not saying it isn't possible..but I am saying it's very unusual/unlikely and something else is going on there.
 
Note that there are other careers in medicine that aren't nearly as soul-crushingly long to achieve that do dabble with medicine.
There are even PA/PhD and BSN/PhD programs out there.

As @Lucca stated, this isn't an either/or type of question. There's alot of paths you can take... some with more medicine and others with more research/teaching.
 
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