Never in the history of medicine have doctors faced such a ruthless gauntlet of threats, financial debts, and practice restrictions than they do today. These factors, among others just as crucial, don’t begin to tell the story about why 40% of medical doctors readily admit to intense frustration in their practices, in addition to the percentage of doctors quitting medical practice completely.
They’re not retiring. They’re adapting. Extended hours to see more patients to make enough income to stay financially solvent is just one highly stressful necessity causing eventual burnout. Coupled with the recognition that private medical office practice for most doctors is not lucrative enough to reach their original goals and dreams for their careers, reasonable satisfaction with medical practice becomes a moot point.
Profound disappointment increases as they realize it will take them a couple decades to pay off their education debts (avg. $150,000 plus), let alone make enough revenue to support a family and cover office overhead. If you have missed the obvious, doctors the day they graduate, are financially hamstrung right from the start. The roots of this dilemma are found in the medical education program itself.
Discouragement intensifies dramatically when they are faced with malpractice litigation. You know…it’s the penalty for using all their best medical knowledge, skills, and judgments to prevent and to treat illness, yet isn’t enough. The most well trained and experienced doctors are subject to malpractice lawsuits, even when they haven’t done anything wrong in their medical practice treatment of patients.
Governmental fee restrictions and intrusions are constantly increasing, which is firm validation that it will be harder to financially survive in practice. Their future practice income for the majority of physicians will barely keep them in the middle class of Americans. For those minority of physicians in the highly profitable surgical specialties such as plastic surgery, orthopedics, cardiac surgery, and anesthesiology, most do quite well in their practices.
The easy solution for most medical school graduates is to join a managed care group as an employee where they at least can earn some money right away. Once they become aware that they aren’t able to practice medicine the way they intended to, they try private practice.
The path into a medical practice career has other unexpected potholes:
Upon entering college and into their pre-med curriculum the idea of becoming a doctor is challenged repeatedly. The high competition for getting into medical school is strongly influenced by their grades. The hard studies and required courses weeds out many pre-meds. Of the one’s who make the grade after four years, there is no guarantee they will even be accepted by a medical school. Who wants to academically struggle for four years only to discover your dreams have just been squashed on the rocks?
Individuals not accepted to a medical school may keep re-applying yearly with the expectation of being accepted later. Rather than wait and hope, pre-med students can apply to dental schools where the competition is considerably less, with the idea they can get into medical school later.
The way things are today, they’d be a lot better off being a dentist for many reasons. So, here’s a student who wanted to become a medical doctor and is often left stranded without a backup career in mind-didn’t think he needed one.
