As the title says,,,
What non surgical specialties requires you to work 12 hrs or less (in public sector)?
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Nobody requires you to work less than 12 hours.
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Yes and you guys to told me to ask this question in the pre-allo forum. What is wrong with asking this question here ?
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fine, I guess.
I don't understand where you are in training
I'm probably annoyed because you received your answer, and by people far more qualified than you'll find here
I don't understand where you are in training
I'm probably annoyed because you received your answer, and by people far more qualified than you'll find here
lol i am a high school senior . ik that is gonna piss u off but yeah that is how it is . i had to lie to get in here. i do have passion for medicine . i really do . I also do have the qualities required to make me a good doctor and everybody tells me that. i am always getting excellent grades , i have a great patience , i am workaholic etc. And i am always doing my best to improve. but the thing is that i am not willing to spend more than 13 hours daily at work. i want to have a normal life but apparently doctors cant do that. unless if there are some medical specialties that require me to work for 13 hours or less (daily). I dont care about the hours that i will spend working during my residency . that is okay for me bcz i wont be having anything to care about except for my residency. But after that , i want to have a family , a normal life ! i dont wanna see them for less than 3 hours a day and then get 5 hours of sleep. you think that i am trolling bcz i am asking stupid questions that medical students already know.
okay how about 13 ?
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I know this will piss you off but how about get into the best college you can, get great grades, join clubs, find something you love to do and volunteer. Sign up to volunteer at a hospital and shadow some doctors. Try out some research opportunities Have some fun. And eventually take the MCAT. After you get that all in place we'll see you back here in 3-4 years when we can talk about getting into medical school. Since you are in HS maybe you should try that forum too.
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neurosurgery requires you work about 3.50 hours in the public sector. Go 4 that bro. gratz on hs bro. sweet 16 bro. l8r bro.
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Medicine is a long houred job. During training in surgery you'd work 24-28 hour shifts periodically and even then feel annoyed that ACGME rules don't let you stay an hour longer to see the occasional cool case or lecture. If your goal is having "a normal life" then being a professional is probably not for you, and maybe medicine and especially surgery in particular is not for you. (You also probably don't know what being a "workaholic" means, BTW). These long houred fields are all about trade offs not normal schedules. You need to expect to work long daytime hours and sometimes need to come back in at night. You need to understand that this is the path you chose every time your pager goes off at 2 am. That being said, some surgical subspecialties are certainly more lifestyle friendly than others, so you might have a more normal lifestyle doing something like urology than you would doing general surgery.
But at the heart of your question it sounds like, at this early stage of your career, this isn't the right path for you. You are already trying to put conditions on things -- that you'd love to do it but only if the schedule will be X. Careers don't work that way. If you want a certain path you'll need to make certain sacrifices, trade offs, and not have the same life balance as the guy in middle management in corporate America. This is a career where you'll miss a lot of holidays and family functions. It's no good going into it saying "I'll do it but here are my conditions".
But at the heart of your question it sounds like, at this early stage of your career, this isn't the right path for you. You are already trying to put conditions on things -- that you'd love to do it but only if the schedule will be X. Careers don't work that way. If you want a certain path you'll need to make certain sacrifices, trade offs, and not have the same life balance as the guy in middle management in corporate America. This is a career where you'll miss a lot of holidays and family functions. It's no good going into it saying "I'll do it but here are my conditions".
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Yes i am workaholic and i also want to have a normal life . I really really want to work as a medicine and if i didnt care about having a normal life i wouldnt be having any problems with working 16 hours a day. So now i have to fit them both in 24 hours which is impossible so i will have to give up one of them. But i am thinking of it like this :
-If i work 14 hours a day i will be having 10 hours left. 6 must go to sleeping. I am left with four hours which must be enough for me to study , do everything that i want to do and that is it. AND that is only if i work 14 hours. We all know that a doctor may be required to work more than that. I badly want to work as a specialist. I know its difficult and full of troubles that i might get into but i know that that is where i should be .
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You are really getting way ahead of the game. You shouldn't be worrying about any of this now. You are a high school senior. Calm down and enjoy life. After high school , college and the first two years of med school you might have a totally different mindset. You might decide in college not even to go to med school. So putting this much thought into this subject now is pointless. Go enjoy your senior year.
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@KMNDR12 I think you want to use the word "permits" or "allows" rather than "requires".
@candbgirl and others, the OP wants to figure out if MD is a good fit before getting too far down the road. If MD is not a good fit, better to find out sooner than later.
Is it possible to work less than a 13 hour day as a physician? It may be possible. There are certainly prescribed hours in emergency medicine although the down side is that you will work your share of holidays and weekends. It is possible to work a prescribed number of hours in primary care and urgent clinics. Occupational health has good hours. Some docs go into non-clinical positions as directors of public health departments (very political).
It is an old saying but true, "find something you love and you'll never work a day in your life." If you really love medicine, you will enjoy the work. First figure out what is involved in the practice of medicine, including the "paperwork" and the continuing education and the B.S. (it is found in every line of work), and if you still find that attractive, start down the path.
@candbgirl and others, the OP wants to figure out if MD is a good fit before getting too far down the road. If MD is not a good fit, better to find out sooner than later.
Is it possible to work less than a 13 hour day as a physician? It may be possible. There are certainly prescribed hours in emergency medicine although the down side is that you will work your share of holidays and weekends. It is possible to work a prescribed number of hours in primary care and urgent clinics. Occupational health has good hours. Some docs go into non-clinical positions as directors of public health departments (very political).
It is an old saying but true, "find something you love and you'll never work a day in your life." If you really love medicine, you will enjoy the work. First figure out what is involved in the practice of medicine, including the "paperwork" and the continuing education and the B.S. (it is found in every line of work), and if you still find that attractive, start down the path.
I dont like not knowing where i am heading . I am always determined and decisive. I have to plan it all.
Yes, thank you. I have been looking way too much into it the past few weeks. I read a lot about the downsides of working as a doctor. I have also talked to a few docs about it and the more i knew about it , the more i loved it. Now the bad part is that it seems like i will be selling my soul to this profession if i decide to go along. I really am not asking for a lot. I just want an acceptable work-life balance that doesnt kill me or keep me away from all the other things that i love to do , forever. That is it. The only problem that i am having is the work hours. 13 daily (even on weekends) is acceptable to me.
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Again you don't know what the word being a "workaholic" means because your focus is on having a "normal life", and a "workaholic", left to their own devices actually would be all too happy to overdo the work aspects and compromise their non-work time. That's the "-aholic" point of the word. So no, you are actually the exact opposite of a workaholic -- your focus is on finding a work life balance while the word you are using is about not having balance. Which is fine, but again not what being a "workaholic" means. In medicine you will have a constant battle with fitting everything in. Putting that definitional glitch aside:
Yes you will work long hours much of this career and yes after work and minimum sleep requirements all too often you really won't have a ton of free time to do everything else in life you consider "normal". Welcome the life of most of the doctors on here. You may need to put a lot of things on the back burner during residency and early career because you will be burning the candle from both ends for a bit, maybe forever. As I mentioned above you'll miss many holidays and family events on this career. You'll continue taking call and end up working periodically on nights and weekends throughout your career. In very few subspecialties will you ever have anything even close to a 9-5 schedule, and where you do, you'll often only get that after paying your dues at the expense of upward career trajectory. This is partly why EM is so popular of late -- with shift work at least you can work only a 40 hour work week, though many will be undesirable shift times.
So you'd better really like medicine because you'll spend a very big chunk of your life doing it. It's a career that works well for workaholics, but is often a poor choice for people who prioritize a normal schedule. That being said it's foolish to make this decision until well into college. If at that point having a "normal life" is still the priority, pick something else.
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That's good. Have you shadowed a variety of docs? Maybe that would help you to start figure this out. How do you know you have a passion for medicine? You'll be fine and you don't have to make decisions now. It's good to start gathering information but slow down and enjoy that normal life you want at all costs.
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Lol "I really really want to work as a medicine"
lol i dont look after i finish typing
Haha maybe you should if you want to be taken a bit more seriously on this site
What you are saying literally makes me feel like i must be there. Because yes, i am ready to leave everything behind and be committed to this profession and i like that. But like i said , if i could only have a little bit more free time .... i really am not asking for a ton of free time. 4 hours should be enough but well , that doesnt seem possible. Still , i am thinking of it.
Its the qualities that a doctor must have. I have them and i am not making things up. I have read tens of articles about it (and talked to some docs about it) and that made me understand what makes a person qualified to become a doctor (bcz obviously not anybody with outstanding grades can be a doctor) . This drives me daily and it keeps me motivated the way i should be.
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The career is what it is. If you don't like the lifestyle choose something else. You don't get more free time in medicine just because you don't feel you are "asking for a ton".
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Sadly, Life is fond of throwing you curveballs, if not beanballs, at any second. If you have control issues, best o deal with them now,.
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When I was a little boy, my only dream was to become vancomycin.
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That would be if if we're giving you limes
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You can't because LIFE gets in the way. Hell back when I was your age I didn't see myself doing what I do now but I rolled w/ life's punches and can't really complain too much.
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Moving to hSDN as OP is in high school.
I understand. I have summed up my decision and i am willing to throw everything away to become a doc. I really like everything i was told by the doctors about working as a doctor even though it has lots of downsides . I am willing to go through it all. The profession requires a strong person that doesnt give up and has passion for medicine which is why i keep on seeing myself fitting perfectly in the field (and there are more reasons as well) . If that is gonna need me to give up everything else , well , let it be. I really dont see myself doing anything else in the future so medicine is my choice whatever its going to take me. Thanks a lot for your answer . It made things more clear for me. I had to give up one of the two choices above and i definitely dont prefer lifestyle over medicine.
lol dude that was just a mistake... i meant doctor
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I don't understand your question or your fixation with the 13 hrs. I work about 50 hours a week. Very rarely >13 hours, which would usually mean a call night, and would include several hours of sleep. I do work some late shifts, but I don't take a lot of call and I only work a few weekends a year. There are many lifestyle specialties or lifestyle jobs if you want one. Just be aware that usually you will have to sacrifice income for time off.
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Il Destriero
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Il Destriero
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Thanks but forget about it. I will take it no matter how many hours i will have to work because like i said above , i do not see myself doing anything else.
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Umm...how does one function normally like that without making fatigue related errors? I mean pulling all-nighters is one thing in college, but in medicine when you're responsible for lives? Ever heard of Karoshi?
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To be fair, @Law2Doc did say "periodically," not constantly.
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Not too long ago the shifts were 30 hours. And before that even longer. The error rates were not any worse then than now. It's a myth that you can't function relatively normally pulling an all nighter every fourth day or so. Or that there's some magic behind the 80 hour work week number. There is actually pretty good data to the contrary now - that the rules add nothing to patient safety.
The only reason schedules were changed by ACGME a few years back had nothing to do with empiric data and everything to do with public perception stemming from the Libby Zion case (where a young woman was contributorily negligent to her demise by not revealing the multiple party drugs she was on but a hospital in the name of public relations threw its resident under the bus). So a bad circumstance poorly handled to avoid bad publicity led to a rule not based at all on data. You'll see when you become a senior resident doing 24 hour call it's really not that big of a deal. It just sounds scary until you do one.
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Coffee, energy drinks and caffeinated soda are certainly popular for those fields that don't need steady hands. But again, this life sounds a lot harder before you actually live it and then you'll realize the fear you had as a premed is mostly unfounded.
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30 hour call sucks no matter how you slice it IMO.
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When I was in the ICU during residency we would have to come in around 530 to pre round, take 24 hour call, frequent pages and admissions all night, and then round until the required 12 o'clock lecture. 530a to 1p the next day... Q4, 3 if someone went out. 31.5 hours in house. It was really painful.
But hey, you got the next day "off". Too bad it was 1/2 over and you were dead on your feet tired by the time you finally got out. I just started skipping the noon lectures post call.
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Il Destriero
But hey, you got the next day "off". Too bad it was 1/2 over and you were dead on your feet tired by the time you finally got out. I just started skipping the noon lectures post call.
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Il Destriero
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Kid, as a 17 or 18 year old, there is no way you could know what being a workaholic is; you've never actually worked in a field where you were required to work exceptionally long hours. This is evndient in teh fact that you think that 4 hours of free time per day is very little.
Rather than a workaholic, which you clearly are not by your posts, I think you might mean more motivated than your peers but again this is in comparison to high school students. Realize that by the time you get to medical school, only the most dedicated will have made it to college, excelled in college, done well enough on the MCAT to apply, made it into medical school and suceeded enough in medical school to make it into a competitive specialty. The average motivated student in high school is orders of magnitude less motivated than the average medical student.
Realize too, that medicine was so focused on work, the government had to mandate that they could only work 28 straight hours. The average doctor works 50-75% more hours than the average citizen in the US. And those arent the workaholics. Those who push strongly for a work-life balanace, especially in the surgical specialties, are on the opposite end of the spectrum from the workaholics.
There is a joke, how do you hide a dollar from a surgeon? Place it on their kid's forehead.
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I didn't say people enjoyed it, just that nobody really finds they cannot function competently.
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While they're bad, they're not that bad and I think it's better than doing a week of night float. honestly, I do think that the 30 hour shifts are better for education than not doing them.
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Agreed. I always felt far more exhausted after a stint of night float than a few 30 hour calls with postcall days.
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Plus on your post call day you could basically live a normal life. The barber and bank are open. You can go the the DMV if you need to. However with night float or with a 12 or 16 hour day system, you don't ever get time out of the hospital during normal banking hours.
I have done multiple systems, and as much as people complain about the 30 hour shifts, I felt they were the most humane.
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I mean hey, I don't mind not sleeping for a day or two; I just don't like feeling of my heart straining and thinking that I could potentially collapse either in that moment or develop a condition when I'm older due to abusing my body. Hypocritical to love the human body and go into medicine only to end up abusing it lol.
Yes i never worked as much as doctors do but i do know that i can do that which is why i know that i belong there. I shadowed a few doctors , got to see how exactly their day looks like and yes i still want it. I am sure of my capabilities and i will be doing the best i could do while studying. I already am the top student at my school (and that is how it has been for the past 2 years) and everybody knows that. Even the teachers keep on telling me that. I was even asked for my picture to be hanged on one of the walls of my school but i didnt like the idea so i refused to let them do that. Anyway, i didnt want to talk about my achievements since this might make the people on this forum think that i am showing off but i had to give you an idea on how good i am at studying. Like i said, i am taking it no matter how many hours i will be asked to work. I only posted this thread to see if there is anything like that but the thing is that even if there is no 13 hr job , i am still taking it. Let it be 28 straight hours. I know that i can take it all , and that is one of the reasons why i cant see myself studying anything else. I am highly motivated and i am willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen.
