Medical doctors (like myself) have invested an incalculable amount of time, money, blood, sweat, and tears to obtain the knowledge to help others heal. Imagine graduating from high school, then spending the next 4 years of your life taking the hardest classes, working against the smartest students, to get the best grades possible, so that you will be qualified to even apply to med school. Unless you are blessed to have wealthy parents, in your spare time you will hold down a job for living expenses and do activities to prove to a medical school admissions board that you have what it takes to be successful in med school. Of course, you will be competing against the very top students in the country to get into one of only about 28,000 spots in the entire nation.
In med school, you will be borrowing money to pay for the privilege of learning how to care for patients. You will work about 60-80 hours a week without pay, sometimes staying up all night during hospital rotations. You will be living barely above the poverty level.
Upon graduating from med school, you will have spent the last 8 years studying and working harder than many people ever do and still have not collected a singe paycheck. By now you've probably borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans you will immediately have to start paying back after graduation.
Then it's time for residency. If you are lucky enough to secure a spot in a residency training program, you will be spending the next 3 to 7 years of your life working 60 to 80 or more hours weekly. You will be one of the lowest paid hospital employees. Your hourly pay will be less than many high school grads (and you are paying back your loans).
You’ll be working hours that would be illegal in any other industry, frequently working 24-32 hour shifts. You’ll be making life or death decisions for people. You will not be prepared emotionally or physically for the stress that you will be under.
As an example: At the end of my 1st year in residency, after being on call up to 16 days a month, often working well over 80 hours weekly, and being extremely sleep deprived for a year, my residency director recommended that I see a psychologist or counselor because I was moody and irritable.
Well, DUH!
Unfortunately, after graduating from residency, the stress level doesn't really decrease. You will continue to be responsible for the health of your clients, sometimes in life or death situations. You will continue to be sleep deprived. Now you will be at war with health insurance companies who don't want to cover the imagining studies and meds you recommend for your patients. If you are employed, you will be pushed to see as many patients as possible, even if you don't have time to provide the best care. And you might have patients who demand treatments that may be harmful in the long run.
It's overwhelming and it sucks.
The sacrifices and stresses of training are incalculable. If I had to do it all over again, would I?
Probably not.
And this is really a scary thing for our society: it takes a minimum of 11 years of education and training after high school to fully train any medical doctor. After 11 years, I finally felt fairly comfortable diagnosing and treating most conditions that my patients would have. Or even being able to recognize rare disorders that I may see in the clinic so that I knew what the next step in their care would be, even if they needed a specialist.
There are no shortcuts to being competent in caring for patients. After the years of training and sacrifice, physicians deserve to be reimbursed for the massive investment that they made to be able to provide exceptional care.
I have invested a lot to have the knowledge to be able to help you and you should be willing to invest a fraction of this amount to get that knowledge.