what are the good and bad aspects of doing medicine as a career?

Answer 1

If you mean being a dr? There are some draw backs and lots of positives. You are going to have to go to school for a long time, then after school you start paying student loans, and malpractice insurance (which thanks to frivoulous lawsuits is really expensive.) Then if you want to have a family it can be tough to balance both out.
On the positive though you can save lives and help people and protect people. It's a lot of hard work but the pay off seems worth it to the dr's I know.
Good luck with your career choice.

Answer 2

Some of the major positives of medicine include working with people, helping people, good money, great job security (people will always get sick...and the baby-boomers are aging so expect TREMENDOUS growth of medical careers over the next few years), and challenging work. The important thing to remember about medicine is that there are many different ways you can enter the profession.

Becoming a physician is very rewarding, but also very difficult and a lengthy process. You'll be in debt when you graduate (after 10-12 years of college/residency), but you'll make more than enough money to compensate for that debt. Unfortunately, it's not all caring for patients. Doctors (and other providers) have to deal with balancing the care you want to provide with a patient's financial situation (including insurance companies that don't always have the patient's best interest at heart.)

Some of the negative aspects of becoming a doctor (long hours, the "business" side of medicine, lack of ability to change specialties) are avoided by becoming a Physician Assistant. PA is one of the top 5 "growing" and "best" careers according to CNN. You still get to practice medicine (diagnose, usually prescribe, physical exams, surgery, etc) under the supervision of physician, but you do sacrifice some autonomy (and respect?) and make significantly less money...but the salary is still excellent and the schooling takes just 6-7 years.

Nursing careers reflect a different side of medicine. You won't be diagnosing and treating illness like a physician, but you'll be carrying out treatment plans and spending more time with your patients caring for their more intimate needs. Again, very rewarding. You can also get an advanced degree and become a Nurse Practitioner and practice much like a PA, but w/o doctor supervision.

Other careers to consider include pharmacy, clinical laboratory science, radiological technician, and physical therapy. I know I've left out many others. Just look at all your options.

If you have compassion for people in need, there's something in medicine for you. If that's truly your motivation, the reward will always outweigh the any "bad aspects" of your job.

Answer 3

It is a feild that will continue to grow and you can practice medicine anywhere in the country or another country. The jobs you get are among the most rewarding because you have the ability to save someone's life. It is a huge area to go into so you would have to narrow it down: Doctor, physician assistant, nurse practitioner, nurse, nurse aid, medical tech., lab tech, and medical researcher to name a few. To be a nurse aid you can take a 2 week class and be able to ge a job. To be a doctor of course you would need a bachelors degree then 4 years of medical school then if you want to specialize perhaps another 3-4 years. The school costs money but of course you will be making a ton so that isn't such a big deal because you can get a loan. All in all, I think it is a great feild to go into, I'm in school for medicine now and I feel like I have made the right decision.

Answer 4

Belly doc said a "belly full" and is quite accurate, but I must add that there are many dozens of specialties that are equally as emotionally (not as finacially, tho) rewarding. Many of those specialties do not involve call schedule or weekends. Those will become apparent to you as you go through med school. The residency programs are generally difficult to get into for such specialties, though.

The fascinating part of medicine is that there is ALWAYS something to be learned. What we know about the human body and mind now is small compared to what will be known 20 or fifty years from now. You are in a peer group of smart people.

I, like belly, thouroughly enjoyed medical school, but it was INTENSE. Whereas college students generally carry 15-17 semester hours, med school does not use the same system of semester hours, but we calculated that it would be equivalent to 26-30 semester hours each term. All your socialization and free time is studying or labs.

Residency or post graduate study varies. You must apply to multiple residency programs and interview, the whole nine yards. The first year of residency is informally called internship, and the PGY-1 (post graduate year one) residents referred to as interns.

Your years of earning potential are diminished by the fact that you have spent essentially another decade of your life preparing for this profession. Managed health care has seriously cut the remuneration for doctors in recent years. The entire health care system is headed for major implosion in my opinion, but that is probably a couple of decades away, maybe more.

Answer 5

I'm a doctor and I love what I do, but I encourage people to enter a career doing what I do only if they are already showing that this is what they want. That being said, however, there are a tremendous number of ways one can go once one has entered the field of medicine by way of going to medical school. Many people go into medical school with one idea, and then change their mind several times before they're done! To answer for the entire profession would be impossible. I'll relate what I know from my personal experience.

Medical school is fascinating, stimulating, challenging, and life altering. That's just the beginning. Medical school is a sandbox in which little doctors-to-be play. Nobody who comes out of medical school is ready to be a doctor. It takes 4 years of schooling just to be ready with the appropriate background knowledge so that the next few intense years of life can be dedicated to learning the art and science of doctoring! Med school is about getting up very early, going to bed late or staying up all night, studying so much that it becomes silly, stressing about exams, and then starting over. Medical school is not much different than college except you take twice as many classes and go ten times as fast. The amount of material to absorb is literally impossible to grasp. The student's job is to do it anyway. Medical school is a MAJOR "good aspect", there's really no experience like it in all the world. If I could do it again, I would! Some of the most interesting people I've ever met were my classmates. We had a ball!!

Following medical school, the young doctor has to obtain specialty training. This can range from 3 years to do primary care (family medicine, internal medicine. etc...) up to 8+ years for various kinds of subspecialty surgery. This post-graduate training is called residency, and it can be tough. Residents are paid a modest salary, they work under close supervision by "attending physicians" who can be absolute slavedrivers, and they put in long hours. There are 168 hours in a week (7 times 24), and I did many weeks as a resident where I worked in the hospital more than 110 of them. I did more than a few weeks of greater than 120 hours. The good news is that the new rules mandate that residents work no more than 80 hours in a week. The bad news is that you won't finish with as much experience as I had, and experience means a lot.

Residency is an incredibly draining experience. I did 5 years of surgical training followed by an additional year of advanced surgical training, and every time I felt like I was going to rise above the pain, I just entered into a new level. Residency strained my marriage, strained my financial resources, and when I finally had kids, it interfered with my ability to be a dad. Although I really enjoyed my work, I really had nothing else going on. In many ways, I'm still paying for all of that, to this day. Residency is a mixed bag of good and bad. A lot depends on one's psychologic make-up.

I still work very very hard. I have a fantastic job doing what I love to do - surgery. I teach surgery and I am surrounded by people who are intellectually fired up about what they do. However, I still frequently put in about 80 hours a week, and always at least 60. I do not have the time to do the wide variety of things I liked to do before I entered medicine. Also, my job is quite stressful. I grapple with challenges at many levels, only some of which involve clinical decision making. There is a whole world of politics within the field of medicine that is impossible to teach about in medical school! Doctors are very contentious people. Most of them, except for me, have a bunch of wrong opinions! ;)

.... Hope that helped.

Answer 6

My father is a doctor so I can tell something about it..
GOOD ASPECTS:
-well paid job
-people respect you
-satisfaction
-sense of great achivement each time you menage to help somebody
BAD ASPECTS:
-lots of studing (said to be very hard) and you have to refresh and update you knowledge all the time
-great responsibility (=stress) people's lifes depend on your abilities
-time consuming job (not for lazy people) you have to love it

Answer 7

well im plannin to do medicine..acc. to me..gud aspects-bright future n bad aspects-lotta study n time consuming(7-8 yrs)

Answer 8

speaking as nurse, less & less school time, no problem finding job, schedule, pay you want--but stressful