Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor nor do I work in the US. My prespective is as a software engineer who contacts daily with doctors.

In order to get into med school you must sure that your high school grades are on the top 5%.

You must ensure that the hospital(s) you work in are able to function 24/7. This means you don't really control your vacations, you must work nightshifts and you will work on special holidays.

You don't get to clock out when your shift ends. You are medicaly responsible for your patitients until someone else takes over. If the patient starts having problems just before the end of your shift, you have to handle it. Its frequent to only actually leave the hospital 2h after.

Your work doesn't end when you come home either. You are supposed to study for exams, to refresh your knowledge over the diseases you are currently working on. You need to build your curriculum by publishing research papers and attending expensive conferences. Your hospital rarelly pays for this. You either lobby with pharmaceuticals in exchange for favours or pay out of your pocket.

In order to get a specialization you have to go through 4-6 years of training/evaluation. That is, if you can get into one in the first place. Due to the limited amount of positions available, doctors have to compete against each other. Only the top 2% will get to the prestigious/high paying positions such as neurology or plastic surgury.

The pressure is huge. People will die or live depending on your decisions. You'll make 10s of those every day.

People will still die everyday regardless of what you do. Its not cost/health effective to try every procedure on all patitents. You will have to come home to your family knowing that you could have saved someone but you decided not to. You will be the one informing their relatives.

They might sue you or the hospital over malpractice. The hospital has insurance for this but its there to cover the hospital, not its workers. You are expetected to have your own insurance if you work in high risk zones (e.g. ER).

Being a doctor is a high risk profession. There are plenty of infectious diseases just lying arround. You never know what the next patient might have. You have to be wary of criminals trying to steal drugs, criminals comming in to finish of someone, patients with mental issues trying to hit you. Not to mention people that have received bad news or have simply been waiting for too long, wanting to take some frustration out on the next person they see.

The 200k average is most likelly misleading. Where I live doctor salaries are very skewed. Most high profile doctors also have management positions and can make 10x than regular doctors.

Sure they get more money at the end of the month, but for what its worth, I wouldn't trade my salary/responsabilities/perks over theirs.

user:	jprafael
created:	August 12, 2014
karma:	64