Name: Is Being a Doctor Overrated?
Uploaded: 2020-06-08T04:05:58.000Z
Duration: 11 min 29 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

The decision to pursue medicine is not one to be taken lightly. It's a long, arduous

path, not only with tremendous financial cost, but also sacrifices to work-life balance,

opportunity cost, and countless other compromises. Do you ever wonder if maybe the field of medicine

is overhyped? Let's set the record straight.

We all have biases, and I like to think I do a good job of being aware and mindful of

my own. As a physician myself who was specializing in reconstructive plastic surgery, who then

changed gears and now builds medical technology and medical education companies, I obviously

have biases. So I'll start with this to quell some of those concerns: yes, becoming

a doctor is, in fact, overhyped, and I believe that a large number of people pursue medicine

for the wrong reasons. But I also think that becoming a doctor can be a tremendously rewarding

If you've ever asked someone what they think of becoming a physician, chances are they

had a highly polarized response. On one hand, if you asked your parents, for example, they

may have gushed about how it's the most important thing for you to do to be successful

and be deemed worthy in their eyes. But if you asked a physician in the middle of his

or her residency, they likely told you to run as far away as possible.

Then you have the armchair experts who aren't even close to having any expertise. These

are self-proclaimed career experts, bloggers, or YouTube gurus who never went to medical

school, know nothing about what it's like to be a doctor, but somehow feel qualified

to tell you about the true, secret, unfiltered and uncut reality of medicine. They're incentivized

to be polarizing to garner more clicks, but as I like to say, the truth to most things

is somewhere in the middle. The only reason you should listen to these people is to learn

what snake-oil salesmen look like and how to avoid falling for their tricks.

I'd argue that becoming a physician is overhyped for the simple reason that the expectations

and popular stereotypes of doctors aren't all that accurate. The sexy allure of calling

yourself a doctor often leads to a large number of students entering the field for the wrong

Will you earn status and respect for all the hard work you put in to become a physician?

Absolutely. While PA's, nurses, and other healthcare professionals all work hard, none

of these paths come close to the rigor of doing 4 years of medical school plus 3-7 years

of residency. You've definitely deserved the status and respect that comes with being

a physician. If you're a nurse, physician assistant, or other healthcare worker, I'm

not downplaying the hard work you have put in, or the value you provide to the healthcare

team, which is tremendous. I am, however, pointing to the fact that becoming a physician

is a far more rigorous training process. That's why physicians have the greatest responsibility

and provide oversight in the healthcare team.

But don't expect the status and respect to actually mean much. In your day to day

life, it won't contribute to any meaningful difference in your happiness. Sure, you'll

have some patients express extreme gratitude, but don't be surprised when you come across

entitled or even disrespectful patients. Being a physician doesn't make you immune to being

treated poorly by patients, hospital administrators, and sometimes even your senior colleagues.

Plus, the popular narrative in the media is that physicians are greedy and make too much

money and that we're to blame for the ballooning costs of healthcare. Spoiler alert: physician

salaries are not the reason for the exorbitant costs of healthcare, but rather rapidly growing

administrative costs, pharmaceutical and equipment costs, and the mess that is health insurance.

When it comes to the salary physicians pull in, let's be real — it's one of few

the professions that can safely guarantee a mid six figure income. Can you make more

as a CEO or startup founder? Of course, but the chances of you actually becoming CEO of

a megacorp or a successful startup founder are infinitely smaller. As a physician, if

you work hard and follow the path laid ahead of you, you'll be making $200,000 to $800,000

per year on average, depending on your specialty. Primary care will be closer to $200k, and

surgical subspecialties like neurosurgery, orthopedic surgery, and plastic surgery will

But this doesn't come without significant cost, notably opportunity cost. While most

of your college friends will graduate and start working with a meaningful salary, you'll

be doing 4 years of medical school and taking out loans. That means while their net worth

increases, yours decreases. Then you'll do 3-7 years of residency where you'll only

be making around $55,000 per year. The average medical school graduate has $190,000 in student

loans. So while you make a much larger salary by the time you're in your 30's, you'll

be starting off far behind your peers who have been working and saving for the last

As I've outlined in a previous analysis, it won't be until your 40's that you catch

up to your engineering colleagues. There's good and bad to the situation. The good news

is that in your late 30's and onward, you'll be very comfortable financially. The bad news

is that your 20's and early 30's you'll feel quite strapped for cash. Can you say

Be mindful that sensationalists have tried to argue that the salaries are far worse than

the averages suggest because of malpractice insurance. Understand that the majority of

physicians, who work for larger practices, groups, and medical centers, have malpractice

insurance already included. It's the private practice physicians who would pay for their

own malpractice out of pocket, but they also generally pull in much higher average incomes

When it comes to career satisfaction, the

data doesn't lie — if you want to be selfish and maximize your own happiness, you should

help others. The issue I've noticed is that too many premeds point to their desire in

helping others as a primary driver in drawing them to the field of medicine. They usually

also add that they like math and science, particularly biology.

That's fine, but understand if you enjoy science and want to help people, you could

also pursue just about any other career in healthcare, like nurse practitioner, nurse,

physician assistant, CRNA, respiratory therapist, and several others. Those paths come with

far less debt, far less responsibility and stress, and far less time in school or in

Why Being a Doctor is Awesome But that obviously doesn't paint the whole

picture. If being a NP, PA, or CRNA was better than being a physician, there would be a mass

exodus of students from premed to other healthcare tracks. It's not that being a doctor is

better than being a midlevel provider — it's just different and what is best for you will

be highly dependent on your own individual personality, desires, and priorities.

and love problem solving and critical thinking, being a doctor will satisfy that need and

then some. Innovating in the operating room as a surgeon, working up an obscure and challenging

medical case, or even conducting research to further improve medical care are uniquely

This does come with added responsibility, however, as you'll be the one whose butt

is on the line if something in the workup or treatment goes wrong. For most of us, that's

not a big issue, and it's a small price to pay for the added reward and fulfillment

you experience when things go well. When you take ownership of treating a patient and are

the one actually calling the shots, you're putting in a larger investment. The downside

is that when things go south, and sometimes they do in medicine as we cannot cure everything,

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Is Being a Doctor Overrated?

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