Hey, don’t get me, or anyone in medicine wrong. I love what I do. It provides a lot of satisfaction from helping people & a tremendous amount of intellectual stimulation. The people I work with are fantastic, which is a good thing considering how much I see of them 
But if you’re going into medicine for the money, you’re about 30 or 40 years too late…
<giggle> Doctors can’t play golf well because they have no time to practice.
Attorneys can’t golf well 'cause they expect the ball to do as it’s told. 
I wasn’t slamming nurses in any way.
More like slamming the institutions that don’t give them their due.
Thanks, Sue, but I was just joking. No, I’ve not chosen the career path that I have because of possible future monitary benefits. I’m anxious to get into Med. school to learn about stuff I’m really interested in. And having worked in a hospital for the past year (not just hokey volunteer work), I’ve found how much I enjoy patient contact. And I love the group of nurses that I work with. Didn’t mean to mislead…
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”
-H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
Unforgiven, if you’re not in it for the payback, you like patient contact and hanging out with nurses, you should be a nurse.
To respond to Sue’s comments about the intellectual inferiority of nurses ;), I’ll throw in an anecdote from my experience. My nursing school class started out with 250 students; this is after the prerequisite courses weeded out the average students. At the end of the first semester, there were 100 left. By the end of the second semester we had 50. At that point, the LVN’s leveled in with us (LVN’s who were pursuing their RN) so our class was bumped up to 100. 53 of us graduated. MY GOD, nursing school was hard. I’ve always been a good student, but I had to study night and day to stay afloat.
Many of my classmates, less than four years later, have already left the profession. I made more money and got more respect waiting tables than I do nursing. The liability is scary- everyone knows that doctors can be sued for malpractice; nurses can be sued too. However, nurses are less likely to be able to afford insurance. I don’t have malpractice insurance, so every day I work I run the risk of losing everything.
Nurses are with those patients 24/7, working twelve hour shifts (which means 14 hours after you’ve given report and done your paperwork). You get to know those patients better than you know members of your own family; you give away little pieces of your soul and a part of you dies every time a patient dies.
So you have here a low-paying, high-stress, high-risk, thankless job. No wonder the average length of time nurses spend as nurses is only five years. Nursing is my life; I love what I do. Still, I know I can’t continue much longer before it destroys me. I hope to leave nursing forever within 3 years (hopefully my student loan will be paid off by then).
If nurses sometimes seem incompetent or stupid, it may be because most nurses are fairly inexperienced. By the time you have enough work experience under your belt to excel, you’re ready to get the hell out of the profession. Of course, the hospital couldn’t care less; there’s always a fresh crop of new grads to hire.
I thought an attending physician was a general reference to the patient’s specific doctor if that doctor has “attending rights” at that hospital.
Holly. You fail to realize that doctors get to do neat things that nurses cannot. Like surgery, be specialized in their fields (yes, I know nurses can be somewhat specialized too), etc.