Why Medicine?

[Sellingman]

I just found out what Pixon's real name was based on his scores in his sig, so I changed mine to hide my identity which I want protected. If you like, I can find out your real name as well.

What?
You're advertising as a tutor, prospective students will need to know/find out your real name won't they?
sounds off to me, interloper

I don't want the whole forum to know my name, only my students. @Truetears, you're right here. I'll remove the add, I admit my wrongs here. Didn't think of that consequence.

[nacho]

I just found out what Pixon's real name was based on his scores in his sig, so I changed mine to hide my identity which I want protected. If you like, I can find out your real name as well.

What?
You're advertising as a tutor, prospective students will need to know/find out your real name won't they?
sounds off to me, interloper

I don't want the whole forum to know my name, only my students. @Truetears, you're right here. I'll remove the add, I admit my wrongs here. Didn't think of that consequence.

99% of the people on this forum will not track you down using your ATAR score. It would be 100% but you're a part of this forum

[MJRomeo81]

Some other reasons why I don't understand the whole money/prestige thing with doing med: (quoted from a harvard blog)

1. You will lose all the friends you had before medicine.
Here’s the deal: you’ll be so caught up with taking classes, studying for exams, doing ward rotations, taking care of too many patients as a resident, trying to squeeze in a meal or an extra hour of sleep, that your entire life pre-medicine will be relegated to some nether, dust-gathering corner of your mind.  Docs and med students don’t make it to their college reunions because who can take a whole weekend off?  Unthinkable.

 2.  You will get yourself a job of dubious remuneration.
For the amount of training you put in and the amount of blood, sweat and tears medicine extracts from you (I’m not being metaphorical here), you should be getting paid an absurd amount of money as soon as you finish residency.  And by ‘absurd’, I mean ‘at least a third of what a soulless investment banker makes, who saves no lives, produces nothing of social worth, and is basically a federally-subsidized gambler’ (but that’s a whole different rant, ahem).

I mean, you’re in your mid-thirties. You put in 4 years of med school, and at least 4 years of residency (up to 8 if you’re a surgeon).  You even did a fellowship and got paid a pittance while doing that.  And for all the good you’re doing humanity — you are healing people, for godssakes —  you should get paid more than some spreadsheet jockey shifting around numbers, some lawyer defending tobacco companies or some consultant maximizing a client’s shareholder value, whatever the hell that means.

Right?  Wrong. For the same time spent out of college, your I-banking, lawyering and consulting buddies are making 2-5 times as much as you are.  At my tenth college reunion, friends who had gone into finance were near retirement and talking about their 10-acre parcel in Aspen, while 80% of my doctor classmates were still in residency, with an average debt of $100,000 and a salary of $40,000.

 3. You will have a job of exceptionally high liability exposure.
Who amongst these professionals has to insure himself against the potential wrath of his own clients?  The investment banker’s not playing with his own money.  And even if he screws up to the tune of, oh, hundreds of billions of dollars, Uncle Sam’s there to bail him out (see: World History, 2008-2009).

The lawyers?  They’re doing the suing, not being sued.  But the doctors?  Ah.  Average annual liability premiums these days are around $30,000.  That goes up to $80,000 for an obstetrician-gynecologist (who remains liable for any baby s/he delivers until said infant turns 18) and into the six-digit realm for neurosurgeons.   Atul Gawande wrote a dynamite article about docs’ compensation in the 4 May 2005 issue of The New Yorker entitled Piecework — check it out.

 4. You will endanger your health and long-term well-being.
The medical profession is bad for you.  Just ask any current doctor or med student.  You will eat irregularly, eat poorly when you do get the irregular meal (and so much for the now-outlawed drug-company sponsored meals — god bless their generous hearts and bottomless pockets), have way too much cortisol circulating in your system from all the stress you experience, have a compromised immune system because of all the cortisol in your blood, get sick more often because of the compromised immune system (and the perpetual exposure to disease – it’s a hospital where everybody’s sick, duh), and be perennially sleep-deprived.  If your residency is four years long, on average you will spend one of those years without any sleep.  A whole year of no sleep. Do you get that?  This is as bad for you as it is for patients — you’ve heard of Libby's Law, right?http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/health/features/n_9426/

[Sellingman]

I just found out what Pixon's real name was based on his scores in his sig, so I changed mine to hide my identity which I want protected. If you like, I can find out your real name as well.

What?
You're advertising as a tutor, prospective students will need to know/find out your real name won't they?
sounds off to me, interloper

I don't want the whole forum to know my name, only my students. @Truetears, you're right here. I'll remove the add, I admit my wrongs here. Didn't think of that consequence.

99% of the people on this forum will not track you down using your ATAR score. It would be 100% but you're a part of this forum

I didn't have a problem with people off this forum knowing who I am, more so if a relative looks in future years at an old post and think hmm, same scores as xxxx, then reads all my posts, wouldn't be happy. Typing something like, 'omg, Melanie Iglesias is soooo hot, I'd bone her' might not be viewed so well at the family dinner table.

[nacho]

I didn't have a problem with people off this forum knowing who I am, more so if a relative looks in future years at an old post and think hmm, same scores as xxxx, then reads all my posts, wouldn't be happy. Typing something like, 'omg, Melanie Iglesias is soooo hot, I'd bone her' might not be viewed so well at the family dinner table.

Fair enough, you're a man of strategy, thinking 11 moves ahead.
i respect that

[kamil9876]

Some other reasons why I don't understand the whole money/prestige thing with doing med: (quoted from a harvard blog)

1. You will lose all the friends you had before medicine.
Here’s the deal: you’ll be so caught up with taking classes, studying for exams, doing ward rotations, taking care of too many patients as a resident, trying to squeeze in a meal or an extra hour of sleep, that your entire life pre-medicine will be relegated to some nether, dust-gathering corner of your mind.  Docs and med students don’t make it to their college reunions because who can take a whole weekend off?  Unthinkable.

 2.  You will get yourself a job of dubious remuneration.
For the amount of training you put in and the amount of blood, sweat and tears medicine extracts from you (I’m not being metaphorical here), you should be getting paid an absurd amount of money as soon as you finish residency.  And by ‘absurd’, I mean ‘at least a third of what a soulless investment banker makes, who saves no lives, produces nothing of social worth, and is basically a federally-subsidized gambler’ (but that’s a whole different rant, ahem).

I mean, you’re in your mid-thirties. You put in 4 years of med school, and at least 4 years of residency (up to 8 if you’re a surgeon).  You even did a fellowship and got paid a pittance while doing that.  And for all the good you’re doing humanity — you are healing people, for godssakes —  you should get paid more than some spreadsheet jockey shifting around numbers, some lawyer defending tobacco companies or some consultant maximizing a client’s shareholder value, whatever the hell that means.

Right?  Wrong. For the same time spent out of college, your I-banking, lawyering and consulting buddies are making 2-5 times as much as you are.  At my tenth college reunion, friends who had gone into finance were near retirement and talking about their 10-acre parcel in Aspen, while 80% of my doctor classmates were still in residency, with an average debt of $100,000 and a salary of $40,000.

 3. You will have a job of exceptionally high liability exposure.
Who amongst these professionals has to insure himself against the potential wrath of his own clients?  The investment banker’s not playing with his own money.  And even if he screws up to the tune of, oh, hundreds of billions of dollars, Uncle Sam’s there to bail him out (see: World History, 2008-2009).

The lawyers?  They’re doing the suing, not being sued.  But the doctors?  Ah.  Average annual liability premiums these days are around $30,000.  That goes up to $80,000 for an obstetrician-gynecologist (who remains liable for any baby s/he delivers until said infant turns 18) and into the six-digit realm for neurosurgeons.   Atul Gawande wrote a dynamite article about docs’ compensation in the 4 May 2005 issue of The New Yorker entitled Piecework — check it out.

 4. You will endanger your health and long-term well-being.
The medical profession is bad for you.  Just ask any current doctor or med student.  You will eat irregularly, eat poorly when you do get the irregular meal (and so much for the now-outlawed drug-company sponsored meals — god bless their generous hearts and bottomless pockets), have way too much cortisol circulating in your system from all the stress you experience, have a compromised immune system because of all the cortisol in your blood, get sick more often because of the compromised immune system (and the perpetual exposure to disease – it’s a hospital where everybody’s sick, duh), and be perennially sleep-deprived.  If your residency is four years long, on average you will spend one of those years without any sleep.  A whole year of no sleep. Do you get that?  This is as bad for you as it is for patients — you’ve heard of Libby's Law, right?http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/health/features/n_9426/

Maybe they are good points, maybe not. Maybe that is good advice for people who want to do medicine only for the prestige or what not. But to be honest i think the same can be said for just about any profession. The blog entry seems to praise the good life of a lawyer, but how many comic strips etc. have I seen making fun of the stressful nature of being a lawyer. I remember reading a similair entry about science/mathematics, but after talking to professors and seeing what they do I see that it can make you eventually happy if you really like it. Likewise I'm sure good doctors who really enjoy it won't find those arguments applicable to themselves, if you are really passionate about something then you will be determined to deal with challenging obstacles.

[kamil9876]

I didn't have a problem with people off this forum knowing who I am, more so if a relative looks in future years at an old post and think hmm, same scores as xxxx, then reads all my posts, wouldn't be happy. Typing something like, 'omg, Melanie Iglesias is soooo hot, I'd bone her' might not be viewed so well at the family dinner table.

Fair enough, you're a man of strategy, thinking 11 moves ahead.
i respect that

true, though he clearly hasn't thought 12 moves ahead by putting his location down as "Kentsington"

[nacho]

I didn't have a problem with people off this forum knowing who I am, more so if a relative looks in future years at an old post and think hmm, same scores as xxxx, then reads all my posts, wouldn't be happy. Typing something like, 'omg, Melanie Iglesias is soooo hot, I'd bone her' might not be viewed so well at the family dinner table.

Fair enough, you're a man of strategy, thinking 11 moves ahead.
i respect that

true, though he clearly hasn't thought 12 moves ahead by putting his location down as "Kentsington"

that's where you're wrong
I saved his old study scores and atar and tracked him down because this is what i do in my spare time
turns out he doesnt live in Kentsington,
this guy has actually thought 13 steps ahead! wow! ingenious

anyways, this is getting out of hand and a little too personal now i think
all im saying is that since you haven't been inside their heads and in their shoes, you shouldn't judge them and their values - reasonable, yes?

[Hamdog17]

I'll start off by saying if you actually have true altruistic ambitions and want to med for the intellectual satisfaction and love of learning then go for it.

However I don't understand why people talk about the so called benefits of following such a career path. Medicine is an emotionally and psychologically draining career.

There is no money. There is no prestige.

Do you like being shafted to the sticks? Get used to it.
Do you mind being blamed by stupid patients and their equally stupid family? Get used to it.

You are NOT likely to be working in metro cities for long. They train excess number of doctors to be chucked to places that has only 2500 people, 6hrs drive from nearest regional city after internship. Say goodbye to your family and friends.

There's pretty much NO TRUTH WHATSOEVER to anything you've said. Doctors earn awesome money (consultants can be on anything from 250k-700k per year), DO NOT face a mass exodus from the city to rural areas after a few years, have the respect of their patients and the community in general. Having done 3 stints of work experience with different doctors and hospitals and having had a student mentor who is a doctor for over a year, little of your post has any truth, except for the long hours part but most top tier occupations have poor hours as well.

[Tashi]

Some other reasons why I don't understand the whole money/prestige thing with doing med: (quoted from a harvard blog)

1. You will lose all the friends you had before medicine.
Here’s the deal: you’ll be so caught up with taking classes, studying for exams, doing ward rotations, taking care of too many patients as a resident, trying to squeeze in a meal or an extra hour of sleep, that your entire life pre-medicine will be relegated to some nether, dust-gathering corner of your mind.  Docs and med students don’t make it to their college reunions because who can take a whole weekend off?  Unthinkable.

 2.  You will get yourself a job of dubious remuneration.
For the amount of training you put in and the amount of blood, sweat and tears medicine extracts from you (I’m not being metaphorical here), you should be getting paid an absurd amount of money as soon as you finish residency.  And by ‘absurd’, I mean ‘at least a third of what a soulless investment banker makes, who saves no lives, produces nothing of social worth, and is basically a federally-subsidized gambler’ (but that’s a whole different rant, ahem).

I mean, you’re in your mid-thirties. You put in 4 years of med school, and at least 4 years of residency (up to 8 if you’re a surgeon).  You even did a fellowship and got paid a pittance while doing that.  And for all the good you’re doing humanity — you are healing people, for godssakes —  you should get paid more than some spreadsheet jockey shifting around numbers, some lawyer defending tobacco companies or some consultant maximizing a client’s shareholder value, whatever the hell that means.

Right?  Wrong. For the same time spent out of college, your I-banking, lawyering and consulting buddies are making 2-5 times as much as you are.  At my tenth college reunion, friends who had gone into finance were near retirement and talking about their 10-acre parcel in Aspen, while 80% of my doctor classmates were still in residency, with an average debt of $100,000 and a salary of $40,000.

 3. You will have a job of exceptionally high liability exposure.
Who amongst these professionals has to insure himself against the potential wrath of his own clients?  The investment banker’s not playing with his own money.  And even if he screws up to the tune of, oh, hundreds of billions of dollars, Uncle Sam’s there to bail him out (see: World History, 2008-2009).

The lawyers?  They’re doing the suing, not being sued.  But the doctors?  Ah.  Average annual liability premiums these days are around $30,000.  That goes up to $80,000 for an obstetrician-gynecologist (who remains liable for any baby s/he delivers until said infant turns 18) and into the six-digit realm for neurosurgeons.   Atul Gawande wrote a dynamite article about docs’ compensation in the 4 May 2005 issue of The New Yorker entitled Piecework — check it out.

 4. You will endanger your health and long-term well-being.
The medical profession is bad for you.  Just ask any current doctor or med student.  You will eat irregularly, eat poorly when you do get the irregular meal (and so much for the now-outlawed drug-company sponsored meals — god bless their generous hearts and bottomless pockets), have way too much cortisol circulating in your system from all the stress you experience, have a compromised immune system because of all the cortisol in your blood, get sick more often because of the compromised immune system (and the perpetual exposure to disease – it’s a hospital where everybody’s sick, duh), and be perennially sleep-deprived.  If your residency is four years long, on average you will spend one of those years without any sleep.  A whole year of no sleep. Do you get that?  This is as bad for you as it is for patients — you’ve heard of Libby's Law, right?http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/health/features/n_9426/

Maybe they are good points, maybe not. Maybe that is good advice for people who want to do medicine only for the prestige or what not. But to be honest i think the same can be said for just about any profession. The blog entry seems to praise the good life of a lawyer, but how many comic strips etc. have I seen making fun of the stressful nature of being a lawyer. I remember reading a similair entry about science/mathematics, but after talking to professors and seeing what they do I see that it can make you eventually happy if you really like it. Likewise I'm sure good doctors who really enjoy it won't find those arguments applicable to themselves, if you are really passionate about something then you will be determined to deal with challenging obstacles.

No liability for people in finance, they just get bailed out hehe.

I do think a lot of people are attracted to medicine because of the money/prestige and because maybe they have a slight interest in science. I think many of my friends who are applying for it haven't really found their true passion. Economics for me is something I loved and with minimal effort I got a high score because it was something I was genuinely interested in. But at our age it's fine to not know exactly what we want to do and many of them will found out in uni whether they really want to pursue medicine or not.

Medicine is a great career for people interested in science because it seems more "stable" than being a researcher. It also is great for people who don't want to become a regular 9 till 5 office worker. But it's a very challenging and demanding career, and those who are not passionate about it I doubt will end up pursuing it. And I would say a lot of people are interested in engineering, although not many girls. I know a few people who want to do dentistry as well but... I honestly don't know why you'd want to look at someone's mouth for a living. Dentistry is kind of a specialisation of medicine anyway, so of course there is less people. Medicine is very broad and there are many different areas of specialisation.

[Sickle]

Eh this thread might be dead already. Just felt like posting my personal motivation for going into medicine.

My current goal is to become a forensic pathologist.

I really want to become a forensic pathologist.

Forensic pathologist => Needs specialisation in pathology => Needs medical skills => Needs medical degree

Hence I want to do Med.

[Russ]

Some other reasons why I don't understand the whole money/prestige thing with doing med: (quoted from a harvard blog)

Can we not quote problems with the American health care system and try to apply them to Australia?

There is no money. There is no prestige.

There is a lot of money and a lot of prestige.

Do you like being shafted to the sticks? Get used to it.
Do you mind being blamed by stupid patients and their equally stupid family? Get used to it.

You cannot be forced to work anywhere you don't want to, which is what your comment is implying. You might work rurally for various reasons related to money, opportunities etc. but you can't be forced to. Anyway, harden up is the appropriate response. Yes, you will have to move around a lot as a doctor, but this is hardly something that should be a dealbreaker for the career.

Wanting to do medicine because it's well paid and offers good job security is not a bad thing. They were part of my reasons. Just make sure that you have other reasons as well. A love of learning is probably the most important, since the field is one of the fastest expanding.

Also, I hope this thread is over it's off topic spiral :<

[paulsterio]

My own reasons:
- Love of learning, sciences and dealing with people
- Lots of communication, it's a career which has a lot to do with people
- Good pay and good prestige, it's a respected profession
- Lots of different career paths later on - different specialities, research, public health...etc
- Very stable job - it can't be pushed offshore and such, some specialities (the one's I like ) have reasonable hours, although some do have really long hours
- You can work in suburban areas and not in the city

Heaps of other reasons as well - most have been mentioned somewhere

Onto the topic of Asian parents and forcing their kids to do medicine, I think this is an interesting issue. It's true in some cases, I don't think we can deny that, we all have heard of situations where parents have "forced" their kids to do medicine, but to say 90% is a stretch, a very big one, to be honest. I surely do not want to do medicine for my family at all.

In Asia, many families are extremely poor and medicine represents an avenue for a good student to break the cycle and have a decent life.

You've also forgotten many other points, there are many more avenues to break the cycle and have a decent life, medicine is probably one of the harder avenues to having a decent life. Many students in Asia who actually do medicine are rich bastards who probably bribed their way into medical school as well, so you have to admit the whole underdog story of the poor student who does medicine to turn his life around is pretty rare and that most of the time, it's more likely that he end up as an accountant, an engineer or something like that rather than a doctor.

Furthermore, here in Australia, there are many other professions which pay just as well as medicine, dentistry, finance and management are just some of the fields. So I think you've got to re-think your information.

Your comments about your "Indian mates" wanting to do medicine is irrelevant, that's anecdotal and is nothing more than a persuasive device, I can easily say that I have a whole heap of curry (sub-continental) friends who want to do medicine as well, but then and again, I have heaps of others who don't wish to do medicine. I also have a lot of white friends who want to do medicine.

To conclude, Sellingman, I suggest you lay off and quit being so bigoted, the world isn't black and white