She gets by, but I don't envy having a job like that. I would think it would be very stressful. It's not unlike the tech support I did for Apple (you have to fix the customer and problem with a target time of 15 minutes), except you have to see the customer face to face and can't do it from home lounging in your pajamas. Not to beat a dead horse, but as I've mentioned before, she'll occasionally take and respond to text messages during session and will sometimes go on about her children. Now that I see from your perspective the stress of her job and thin about it more, I can see why she might do that even if she shouldn't. She must like her job OK because she's moved offices 4 times since I've seen her and this is the one she has stuck with. She says it's because they have the best office staff (they are certainly good sentries: no calls go through!).
Sometimes I really do see her for just 15 minutes, sometimes more.
What I dislike is that there is a bell that goes off at the 15 minute mark (sometimes sooner it seems to me) that comes from the front desk. The bell comes from the secretary to keep her on time. Sometimes she'l keep talking through the bell for another minute or so, and then its frequency increases. I say bell, but it's an electronic sound. I'm not sure where the sound comes from.
In her defense of seeing so many patients, I don't think she gets paid very much relative to other doctors. I just saw my cardiologist the other day and I asked him how he's always on time and never stops me from asking questions. And he said, "I know you. We schedule you that way." He had a student observing him (and me) who had finished medical school but hadn't started residency. I was telling her I thought cardiology seemed like a great profession in that my doctor never seemed rushed, and he corrected me and said "Terrible lifestyle, great pay." I thought of this forum because you all talk about the lifestyle aspect often. I mentioned psychiatry to him as something that might have a better lifestyle and he said he thought ophthalmology has the best. At least to me, it seems like his job has a better lifestyle than psychiatry. It seems like we almost spent an hour together talking (I have a number of issues: dilated aortic root, POTS, orthostatic diastolic hypertension), and he was so relaxed, like he had all the time in the world. He bills way more than my psychiatrist, though (not that I self-pay--I'm lucky to have very good insurance).
I woud have to ask my dad what the exact numbers are since he deals with all that stuff, but it's a pretty big difference from what I recall.
