At some time in our lives I suspect many of us have entertained fantasies of being a doctor - you see yourself inventing a cure for some hideous disease, performing life-saving surgery, going into the bush and administering badly needed healthcare to the natives, making fat stacks from practicing a specialty, maybe just being a good family doctor, occupying a special place in our society.
The number one thing that made a medical career (or any science for that matter) a non-starter for me is competency in math and chemistry, both of which I suck at. There’s the smells and the weird stuff like dermoid cysts, which are probably just the tip of the weirdness iceberg, but I’m sure the revulsion would have been trained out of me. Anyway I never got to that point.
So why aren’t you a doctor?
And if you are a doctor, of course please chime in with your take, or why you were almost not a doctor.
Failed the graduate entry exam by one point (in an essay question on Hayek of all things). I scored in the top 25% of 2000 entrants (400 or so places on offer nationwide), but without that one point in the essay paper I didn’t make the cut-off for interviews.
For me it was biology - the basic entry-level college course. I managed a D only because my lab partner was desperately trying to keep me from dragging his own grade down.
I never had any dream of being a doctor and it’s a good thing, too. I have a hard enough time telling some poor student that their hard drive or display screen is dying, I could not do that with sick people.
Math and chemistry. But even if I’d been good at those, there is no way I could have handled the sleep deprivation of med school, internships, residency, etc. One 48 hour weekend at a hospital running on 3 hours of sleep and I’d either be hospitalized or leave a trail of dead patients in my wake. I’d give just about anything to be able to run on 4 or 5 hrs of sleep a night but I need about 10 just to function
Not sure really - you take medicine as your primary degree here in the UK (ie start at 18) and AFAIK you need to be lining up your application a few years ahead of time to be competitive. So if you don’t feel the call when you’re 15-ish you probably won’t go down that road.
You can go as a graduate as Szlater mentions, though, so the opportunity is there if you get drawn to it during your first degree in something else.
I never wanted to be a doctor but I wanted to play one on TV. My father is an actual doctor though so I got to see it close up. 40 years later I’m glad I never even got close to that profession.
Doctors graduate from all that schoolin’ with a heaping mound of debt usually. Yes, they make good money and should be able to pay it off relatively quickly. But not when they have to buy “doctor cars” to fit in with the rest of the MDs and the folks at the country club.
Doctors trade their time for money. The knowledge involved means lots of money for that time, but it’s still just money for time, day after day. Stop seeing patients and you stop making money. There’s no sitting back and coasting for a while, no residuals, no business that can kinda run itself, it’s just one man digging very expensive holes. Best you could hope for in your old age is a cushy hospital admin job or a hired gun for trials, and I don’t think those opportunities come up all that often.
Taken as a whole, no thanks, not for me. Purely for financial reasons.
Kids are doing ridiculous amounts of voluntary/job shadowing/work experience, the ones who have a family member/family friend who is a hospital doctor are at somewhat of an advantage. I say that as someone who had to babysit countless children of the boss’ friends whilst they put their hours in getting that all important job shadowing (which he frequently derided as a waste of time).
Places on the graduate courses are few and far between.
Not to be nitpicky (actually, yes, to be nitpicky), I assume that you intended your OP to read “Why aren’t you a Physician”?
I’m a Doctor (PhD), not a Physician (MD).
As to why I’m not an MD, medicine interests me in an academic sense, but not a practical one. I easily could have gone to Medical School if I chose to. I chose to became a research scientist instead.
Partly because I didn’t want to dissect a cat, which you HAD to do to take AP Biology at my high school. I couldn’t stomach the thought, so I skipped that AP class. The majority of the semester’s coursework centered around the dissection. If you weren’t cool with dissection, you couldn’t take the class. There was no alternative activity, since the class wasn’t required.
Also, my mom is a nurse and, through some strange freak of genetics (or possibly overexposure to TMI stories), I just do not have it in me to do healthcare. At all. I’m like Katniss in Hunger Games, I just CANNOT stand to be around unhealthy people. Just being in a hospital makes me feel vaguely nauseous. I don’t hork at the sight of my own blood or vomit, I can deal with that. But I can’t deal with anyone else’s fluids. yecch! I kept my grandma company overnight in her hospital room toward the end of her life, and I’ll never be able to do that again.
I appreciate what healthcare workers can do every day. I don’t know how they do it, though. yeeccchchchhc!!
