Agree with sledge. No group is gonna take a fresh newb and spoon feed him patients so that he can work 4 days a week. You gotta make yourself available at odd hours and take the less-desirable cases to build up a patient base so that you can at least break even.
You HAVE to work a MINIMUM number of hours to be able to pay your overhead and YOURSELF. A grossly over-simplified example:
Let's say working 80 hours (including call duties) as an ortho grosses you $500k... malpractice is 50k overhead, office, staff etc is another 100k... ergo, you take home $350K before taxes (listed national avg income of an ortho, probably way south of the actual figure).
If you worked 40hrs (if this is even possible), you'd gross 250k. Your malpractice wouldn't change much, and you're over head probably wouldn't change by much.
250- (150 or 100) = 100-150k...
Sounds more like Shorty's Pawn and Kwik Loan than Bank
Reducing your hours by 50% decreases your take home by more than 50%.
This is of course a gross overexaggeration (gross and over head figures are probably much higher), but my point is by decreasing a certain percentage of hours, you take a disproportionately greater percentage cut in your take-home.
Not that making anything in the 6 figures is something to cry about, to the majority of the public.
-Hans