Hey All,
I'm posting the following not to be more of a downer but, well, because this thread is titled 'medicine sucks.'
This post actually comes from a dental website that I read (I left dental school for medical school) and was made by I believe an endodontist. The post was made in response to someone who is trying to decide between medicine and dentistry and asked for opinions on this forum.
Personally I think medicine rocks, but I want your opinion:
"Medicine sucks. My best friend since childhood was my roomie when I was in dent school and he in med school. I still have contact with some of those guys. My friend went into plastics, and is doing pretty well. Many of the others in primary care (family, internal, peds) are unhappy. A few are so disillusioned it borders on pathology. One buddy of mine, an ENT, got completely out of clinical medicine, and he was double boarded in ENT & general surgery. Working on a Jewel in AmWay now, and working on some foreign ventures with hearing aids in Asian markets.
My one friend who's still damn happy is an ophthalmologist netting close to $2M a year doing, you guessed it: Lasik. The urologist across the street from our home works his freakin' ass off but makes a great living. A derm I know and go to, loves it and takes no PPO's! They're in the minority.
My other buddy, a neurosurgeon, had a molar RCT/BU/Cr. He was being flippant at a social gathering, saying that he paid me $1800 up front for that treatment, yet he takes longer than he spent in my office taking out a brain tumour for $1300 from Medicaid or Medicare, $1550 from an insurer, and he's lucky to see that money in six months.
We now graduate fewer dentists per year than we did when Eisenhower was president, yet dentists are quitting and retiring at a higher rate. Think what's happened to the population since then. Med school admissions are obscenely high, heavily govt subsidized and the INS gives foreign-trained MD's immediate priority status for expedited admission to the US, then they just have to pass a standardized exam for licensure by credential in the US. The influx of foreign dentists, on the other hand, is close to zero, since states refuse to permit them licensure by credential or exam. They all have to do at least the last two years of dent school at a US dental school, pass parts I and II of the Nat Boards, and only THEN they are permitted to take a licensure exam.
More than half of dental graduates are women, but female dentists don't work as long a career as female physicians do, nor as long as male dentists.
The prestige of physicianhood is still high, but they're not as esteemed as they used to be.
Needless to say, after all the bragging rights have been spent; after all the cocky presumptuous sideways glances at mere mortals have lost their ability to instill a smug sense of self-satisfaction; and after the brutal reality sinks in that the money ain't that great and is getting worse while working for a patient population that neither pays for their own care nor feels an iota of shame for calling the ambulance chaser at the first hint of a complication...after all that, medicine just ain't what it used to be. Today it is a job, a vocational commodity, traded and jockeyed around like pork bellies or unskilled labor pools. And it is so sad you could cry, that the profession that used to only attract the best and the brightest, now attracts the misinformed and the liberal-fed altruists, yearning to "make a difference" or the terminally insecure obsessed with being what their equally-misinformed elders felt was the quintessence of success...al while ultimately being overworked, overscrutinized, over second-guessed and vilified.
Go for it if you want or you must, but don't say no one ever told you about the down side."
Edit: The reference is here, post #16:
http://www.towniecentral.com/Messag...3404&g=1&st=leaving practice for oral surgery