Losack MD's thought for the day: Time to argue and disagree if you care to.
all these messages, threads and forums makes one think of a nursing practitioner/physician assistant career. Stay stateside, study in comfortable surroundings, less tuition, dedicated professionals who probably ( no not probably ) most often take more time with patients and are now doing what docs do and make alot of money. They can write scripts! People in rural areas go to them!!!!!!! Doctors dont go to rural areas. Ive made a damn good living due to this fact. I have in the last 13 years done Locum tenens. I did all Normal doctors did before that.
My prediction but not in our lifetime there will no longer be as many physicians.
college will be irrelevant as it is now... its really to keep kids off the streets for 4 years and out of the employment pool. And it teaches kids nothing about their future.
med school in stead of 4 years, will be 2 mostly clinical hands on. This is I think food for thought. My wife ( a PA ) can fix a wound, suture, knows what to do in a crisis, can hear a murmer, give a diff dx, knows sensible medicine, cares about pt care, can deliver a baby, knows general medicine as much as an internist etc etc etc . There isnt one radiologist psychiatrist dermatologist,ophthamologist, pathologist, etc who would know what to do in most med emergencies let alone stop at the scene of an emergency. Lawyers are all over watching remember!
Dr Kildare, Ben Casey Marcus Welby are gone. Machines labs rays technicians will spend more time with you than your physician. Medicine has become mechanical and businesslike a la Americana. You will forget 90 percent of what you learn in MED SCHOOL after the exams are over. This MD ( the suffix ) seems to mean more than what it used to represent - a helper a teacher a healer not an investor in a PC, INC. My colleagues talk more about golf, buying properties, investing, malpractice than actual medical topics and how their job ( once presitgious ) is a pain a hassle and no more exciting than going to a B movie. You young docs will not know what im talking about yet!
A great doctor is one who listens, really listens, not just does things.
You can understand a patient without doing 10 tests. You can figure out what is wrong most of the time by listening and taking an interest, not by looking at your watch so you can send your kid to college.
A great doctor takes time with their worried patient. Few Doctors can afford to. A great doctor holds their patients hand not sends in a tech to take blook or shove a tube up your rectum to do so. A great doctor forms a bond with the patient. This is the exception not the rule. A great doctor continues to learn, not takes a cruise gets blasted and collects their 60 CME's. A great doctor doesnt think theyre a great doctor. Most doctors today think they know everything. yet few diseases have cures ,just symptomatic alleviation. A great doctor admits failures. Today doing that will strip you of your license and cost your insurance company millions. I could go and on and on. If you think this is pessimistic you are idealistic and too young in the field. I have seen hundreds of MDs at work at play talking
about their choice of career. few want their children in it. Few would do it again.
if ive hurt your feelings and dreams and ideals and idyllic notions of the career, its the doctors themselves that have shot themselves in the foot. The system has made it so that we cant be Great Doctors. We follow the protocols. It scares me seeing these youngsters with the white coat books in pockets patella tapper, flashlights, steths
looking more like a cop than a human being trying to help others in pain ( mostly mental remember ). That young MD with their name ending in MD on that white tag dangling with the tourniquet and hammer serves more to reassure themselves that they should know more than they do but dont and let me tell you there are interns and residents that still cant start an IV. We have phlebotomists.
ready set go!!!!!!!!!!!!!