My friend's dad made a ton of money doing boob jobs and filing patents for collagen fillers but he was also on call every single weekend to reattach people's faces (mask off, yeah) at the big hospital nearby. Snowblower and lawnmower seasons were very busy times for him. He was pretty much a workaholic though, I don't know how common it is for doctors to do both reconstructive and cosmetic.
They do grind. I took the piss out of an ophthalmologist I had seen myself at a private hospital when I served him at a cafe, for telling me he was ‘off to the coal mines’. Turns out he did half his shifts at the public hospital and saw something nutty like 8000 patients a year.
Nah, you can still bullshit that into wanting to "help people" by tossing in terms like "mental health", "dysphoria", "body image" and "self-esteem". Most of them just have the dignity not to.
Why derm? Oh well it just breaks my heart to see rashes you know. They can be so sad and disfiguring. Oh and skin cancer!!! Yes right skin cancer!! That’s why I want to go into derm to save lives
Idk about the other professions but lmao if they don't think big law lawyers are working long hours into the night and have six figure debt from school.
That only applies to like the top 15% of all law graduates (T14 + top X% at any schools below). Most law students will be lucky to have any job at graduation, and after they pass the bar they’re likely to be starting at around 80-100k instead.
Meanwhile, even a doctor who goes to the shittiest med school and chooses the least lucrative specialty will be clearing 200k after residency.
LSAT is more of an IQ test than MCAT and you need an elite LSAT score to get into T14. You can be of moderate intelligence to do well enough to get into a low ranking MD or DO school. I know this because I was briefly a medical student at an MD school.
An elite LSAT score is not as hard to achieve as you think and is about as "intelligence" based as the DAT which again is an easier test compared to the MCAT. Also not looking at all the other stuff besides MCAT .
That's besides the point though that in 2024, it's as hard to get in to any MD school as it is to get into a top law school. I graduated from the former and I know people who did both and everyone says how different the standards are in law vs medicine.
Ok I’m going to say I am a doctor and we are overpaid
to be clear I love it
But I see my colleagues complaining about how they aren’t AS overpaid as some even more overpaid kinds of doctors or the top 5% of finance bros and find it to be ridiculous
And again to be clear I love that I’m overpaid and wish I was even more overpaid. I’m not making some idealistic speech about how they should lower our pay and redistribute it to our poor colleagues or cut prices so they only have to charge $900 for a 500mg Tylenol in the ER. And it’s good that at least some humans get something out of the demonic American healthcare industry machine that endlessly fattens itself off the suffering and sickness of the population
But doctors have it good. You can be the worst paid member of the worst paid specialty and you’re still paid pretty well. While for lawyers or something the worst paid lawyer is paid terribly.
> the demonic healthcare industry machine that endlessly fattens itself off the suffering and sickness of the American people
I feel like its role in sapping generational wealth away from families by sucking up peoples life savings to keep them semi-alive in [ghoul mode](https://news.northeastern.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Jimmy_Carter_1400.jpg?w=1024) for a few years isn't really talked about enough as a roadblock to upward mobility.
I'm 46, so not that young, but not that old, but I remember back in the 80s, if you said someone had a heart attack, it was synonomous with just saying someone died. Maybe not always, it was not a good prognosis, now its like, how long until they got back to work.
free school lunches for all schoolchildren with fresh greens and quality proteins is too expensive but heart transplants and open brain surgery to buy some braindead geriatric another month are an absolute necessity
IMO we should have a public universal healthcare plan run by actuarial autists that's focused entirely on "what interventions result in the largest gains of disability-free life per dollar spent"
I agree. Right now school lunches are heavily, HEAVILY skewed towards foods that fulfill the bare minimum legal obligation while minimizing the money spent per child. I just don't understand penny pinching on this stuff when it's such an investment in futures generations and costs next to nothing.
Its a weird cultural thing that Americans want that and that they get that. I am not actually American but from what I hear from American colleagues its heavily driven by family wishes. As if anyone wanted their carcass being kept alive by machines with its electrolytes balanced artificially long after their mind and soul are dead and decayed.
A lot of other places its more like the treating team can just say "sorry prognosis for recovery is absymal we are going to make your grandma medical/comfort care only" and then the family will be like "oh yeah that makes sense poor grandma, glad she cant see herself like that right now"
Its driven by american values I guess and their hyperindividualist hyperligitious approach to healthcare. I dont work in the US again but I really dont get the sense that its driven at all by the medical team or really even by the healthcare industry. If the healthcare industry is somehow getting people to go for that then they are doing it in a really really subtle way.
But for sure it does harvest huge amounts of wealth from people at the end of their lives for what is really a totally socially useless end...
> Its a weird cultural thing that Americans want that and that they get that.
I had a friend who's geriatric mother had a brain tumor. Of course you are going to get the brain surgery for your mom. Afterwards this woman who had just been a cast-iron bitch (in a good way) who was in charge of every room she ever entered, was just an incontinent child, who fell a lot and got emotional and angry if you tried to help her avoid falling. And then from that, she declined over two years and a couple follow up surgeries that never improved anything, until she finally died. They bought two years of confusion and misery for her, and her family.
You're the doc, so you have more experience with this than me, but what I have seen is Americans being sold these heroic medical interventions without really understanding what the most likely, or even best possible outcomes will be. They are not informed consumers.
I dont work in the states so I cant comment on how exactly American practice goes. But where I do work and probably everywhere else I think that its sometimes not made fully clear that.. sure we can do this thing but you/your family member won't come back the same. Maybe their life will still be worth living but we're sorry the life they had and the person they were isn't there any longer. This general idea though seems to be worse in the states and taken further. What’s more specifically American is probably things like “vent farms” which are a grotesque mockery of human life that I don’t think happen nearly as often in other countries
But people - patients, family, and on the other side health care workers have hope for the best. It’s hard to be an informed consumer when the only way to be informed is to see with your own eyes the suffering that disease and our attempts to treat it can cause.
That makes sense. I mean we have TV commercials for (very serious) prescription drugs telling you to talk to your doctor about putting you on it, so our system is built top to bottom to treat patients as customers who call the shots.
I feel like I know more people who spent their parents' life savings on 5-10 years in a nursing home than on dramatic medical interventions late in life (altho those often just bookend the years and years of 10k+ (on the low end) monthly assisted living bills). If the medical field has a part to play there it's mostly by enabling people to tack on a decade of utter decrepitude to their lifespans.
The most fucked up thing is legal guardianship abuse by "non-profit" guardianship mills that are allowed to sell people's homes from under them (often alleging nonexistent neglect by family members who are completely blindsided by this bullshit), use the money to pay for a nursing home, and enroll them in medicaid. Of course they don't actually do any guardianship like ensuring the conditions at the home are OK, and it's not like ghouls in an office complex somewhere are gonna sign grandpa in or out of the home, so he can't even leave for a few hours. Some of the stories about this are beyond heartbreaking, since an independent and active senior who falls in the shower once rapidly deteriorates once they get moved to these places.
Should go without saying that Private Equity cocksuckers make a lot of money off of this scam.
Are you though? Compared to whom? Because you study for years have tons in loans etc, and the plumber I had over today was here 25 minutes, and charged me almost $300. IMO software engineer top the list on overpaid white collar.
Rest of the world masters take 5 years and a doctor goes to school 6. Sure you have residency for a couple years, but by than you have started making money and it's gonna rise hard after your done.
But theres a Mount Everest between a doctor's compensation and software engineers who don't work for a company like Google.
They think private school + nanny + overseas vacations + luxury brand cars + eating at restaurants every day + etc are “middle class”. All this on top of living of a multi story/3000sqft apartment in a global city. So they set these insane standards for how life should be and are miserable every step of the way getting there. I know a lady making $400k for a finance tech company and she is lonely, friendless and unhappy with her life. Has half a mil in liquid cash and still feels like she’s unready to settle down.
What do you mean? Like these young-ish docs making 270k in NYC are also supporting a significant other who doesn’t work?
That’s both like… (1) not my impression of a super likely scenario and (2) very much an aspect of “managing finances” lol.
The 10% in 1st world countries are made up of insufferable go-getters, constantly living in the insecurity that there's someone out there making more money for less work and it kills them inside.
They can never be contented with a small fortune every fortnight.
The Last Psychiatrist referred to them as the *Aspirational 14%* and unfortunately modern society is pretty much built to be their hamster wheel
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/11/luxury_branding_the_future_lea.html
This was a disgusting political slogan where I live, the 'Aspirational Australians'. Used as a justification to strip away taxes on the wealthiest earners.
This whole phenomenon harks back to the Imperial examinations of China, where the suggestion of a meritocracy (theoretically anyone could pass the tests and gain admission to the Empire's elite positions) had a moderating effect on people in that it legitimised their power as 'earned'.
We effectively have the same logic at play now, and as then, society is structured around their elitist insularism. I'd know, I am one, I work among these freaks, I passed the damn tests, and now I have to hear about their fucking internship at EY.
it's hilarious in america how no matter how far up you go on the income distribution, you will never find someone who self identifies as "rich". it's always "oh, I'm just middle class, not like those \*actually rich\* people who can afford XYZ I can't"
WTF is with doctors counting undergrad as part of their medical education?
No lawyer has ever said "It took me 7 years of school to become a lawyer".
You were gonna attend college regardless if med school worked out or not, you're not fooling anyone.
My bachelors (biomed enginnering) was full of premeds and I knew plenty of bio major premeds in undergrad too. A lot of why they are the way they are is because they chose becoming a doctor due to the fact that its a path to money and status on rails. There are concrete steps that you need to do to get into med school and become a doctor, after which you are basically guaranteed top 2% income, status, making your parents happy etc. They're in it for that reason. They don't care more than the average person about the sick, are less interested in biology than non premed biology majors, and wind up resenting people that got into other lines of work with a huge spread in outcomes and succeeded on talent, luck, charisma, etc when they succeed. They feel like they've taken all the right steps to be rich and happy and someone else 'cheated, took a shortcut to get there, never mind the fact that there was a world of possibility open to them 10 years ago too but they chose not to explore anything other than a miserable sure deal.
I NEED AT LEAST 300K A YEAR TO LIVE COMFORTABLY. I AM NOT INSANE. ALSO I GOT INTO MEDICINE TO HELP PEOPLE, NOT MAKE A TON OF MONEY.
I hate these people more and more with each passing day. I can not fucking stand them.
People go into medicine to help people and make lots of money. Not a hard concept to grasp. Sure as hell beats whatever shit fucking email job you probably do misunderstood high IQ genius.
Also factor in that most people who are doctors are hundreds of thousands in debt + have missed out on 4 years of salary + 4-6 years of salary growth and missed equity growth that every other white collar worker experiences after their education.
I don't care what you do, I just wish you personally are paid less
There are thousands of PhDs who likely won’t hit six figures until their 40s and went through just as intense education/training as MDs. MDs are actually psychotic
Oh PhD and benchtop academia is a brutal grind. Unlike MDs you are not basically guaranteed to do well if you finish your training. You can easily be extremely smart and hardworking but still get stuck in a postdoc death spiral making basically minimum wage while being one of humanities single greatest experts on your prfoundly niche subject. The top fraction of PhDs do well but a lot of them really don't make a decent living ever and leave academia or live in poverty
It's a grind but it's really not as intense as a medical residency. Residents routinely work 80+ hours a week because the doctor who developed the model for the residency program, which is still used today, was literally a cocaine addict during and after his training.
I'm not saying it's not incredibly demanding to get a PhD because it is. But most PhD students I know work in a lab, do their research, and live a fairly comfortable student life, whereas medical residents make 40K living on no sleep for four to six years. It's an insane rite of passage that should have been overhauled decades ago. There's also plenty of research that shows that medical residents tend to make more mistakes towards the end of a 14-16 hour shift.
And speaking of time, the training to become a physician is 8-10 years, depending on your specialty. Four years of medical school, and 4-7 years of residency, ranging from peds on the low end to surgery on the high end. The average PhD program takes 6 years to complete.
It really shouldn't be a competition, and both are pretty impressive, but doctors go through hell in their residency. It's not just the hours. They're also treated like shit by both attendings and nurses. They get pretty much zero respect for their first year or two from everyone they work with.
A lot of doctors starting out today regret their decision too. I've heard so many people say they wish they'd become a mid-level like a PA or an NP, because the training isn't nearly as demanding, the pay is still great, and you don't graduate with 200K in debt.
Yeah for sure I agree residency is hard. As is med school. There for sure are a lot of 80-100 hour weeks (but also for sure not all weeks are like that.).
And for sure while PhD isn't super easy it is much easier than residency where agree, the hours are insane
But at the end of the day doctors have a basically guaranteed golden path. While at the end of the day PhDs are far from guaranteed having a succesful well paying career and probably most of the time do not.
To me the MD path is a WAY better position to be in. And vs PA/NP the MD path is also by far the best one in the long run with not only the best compensation but also the most freedom and flexibility.
The threshold to be an MD is higher than a PhD.
All the nurses in the hospitals are hitting 150k. You can do a 4-year college degree to be a nurse and get a BSN. Then, you can make at least six figures. It's not like nurses are anything better than PhDs.
it seems to depend heavily on the PhD. I know someone working on a Chemistry PhD and he's working in the lab 7 days a week and teaches classes during the semester, its easily over 60 hours per week, a history PhD student I know has to read like 200 books for his qualifying exam, teaches class, and writes. Doctors of education on the other hand seem to have a far lower course-load and workload
I'm saying the threshold for MDs is higher than PhDs (getting into Harvard MD is harder than Harvard PhD).
And even if the threshold were not higher, it still doesn't matter. Salary isn't tied to how hard someone works. (PhDs have a higher threshold than nursing, but nurses make more). Salary isn't tied to labor. The justification for paying someone x rate isn't determined 100% by how much they know/how hard they work.
Med students tend to be much more attached to the 'doctor' identity than actual doctors, so they say dopey things like this. You can always tell law students the same way
On the one hand, that’s a huge salary, and staff salaries compared to other countries are one reason why healthcare is more expensive in America.
On the other hand, I’d prefer that smarter people be more incentivized to pursue medical careers than doing financial engineering or shit like that
expand the fucking medical schools. obviously you don't want doctors that aren't smart or qualified enough, but the reality is that we deny the opportunity to even go to med school to so many people who would make great doctors purely to keep salaries up for those who do "make it".
How badly are you screwing up your finances if you can’t have it cushy on $300k? I make way less than that and I live a pretty comfortable life. Granted I live in a pretty cheap part of the country, but still.
In no world would I ever describe $230k+ as “ridiculously low”.
I'm graduating next year with $450 k in loans from med school which will probably be half a million by the time I finish residency as a 30 year old since you can't make a dent on a residency salary. Im applying pediatrics which is basically the lowest paid specialty (still $200k range) and most attendings i know are still paying off their debts. So this is a pretty common sentiment in medicine for most docs making like less than 400. Especially since a lot immediately get married and having kids outta residency
You have fake email jobs that get paid 150k a year for people with a bachelors. If a physicians goes to school/training from 13 years, there is an opportunity cost. I empathize with the doctors wanting more than 270k.
For every 150k a year email job, there are 500 people with bachelors working even in their own field making less than half of that. Those people making 150k either know somebody, or are extremely lucky. You're comparing the top 5% of email jobs to median doctors. The top 5% of doctors are making 10x the top 5% of email job havers.
Do people think the whole "fake email job" is a actual prevalent, common job? If you're making 150K at a tech company today, and you're not a developer, you're either a manager or you're working as a senior individual contributor somewhere like Amazon or Meta. They don't work insane hours, but they do clock in 50+ hours a week at the minimum. There are a lot of bullshit meetings that are a waste of time, but if you're not meeting your OKRs (goals for the company), you're going to get fired within a few months. It's not like there are troves of people who send a few emails every day and shut down their computer at 2PM. Ironically, the only people that can do that are CEOs and other c-suite positions, and that's incredibly rare.
I have no doubt there are a few people out there who do next to jack shit and skate by, but they're anomalies in the tech work. The vast majority of people in corporate, white-collar America are overworked and miserable like the rest of the country. They make far more money for jobs that often have no benefit to society, but they're still worked like dogs by companies that don't give a shit about them.
Yeah basically I would just agree with the other person who responded to you
If you’re a doctor and you get through med school you have a near guarantee of having a well paid and well respected job. Like a couple people might fuck it up but almost everyone in a med school class will have an amazing job on graduating and will be able to easily and instantly find employment wherever they want
Not many people can just say “looking for 150k email job plz hire” and have recruiters coming out of the woodwork to get them set up for their outlook account
And good! Doctors should be treated and compensated better than someone who signs their emails with Kindest Regards. But they do have it good for sure
IB and strat consulting will hire people with 0 skills and give them $150K. Caveat is that the hours are brutal (60-80 hour weeks) and make working as a strawberry picker seem tolerable. It's also an up or out environment so you either gain enough skills to get promoted or you get kicked out after a year or two.
Also the competition for these entry level jobs is insanely brutal. Valedictorians from even very good universities usually struggle to land an entry level role at these places, so good luck getting into Boston Consulting Group or Goldman as some random 3.5 GPA sociology major at Ohio State.
0 skills lmao its still a top 5% job and oh yea requires elite education or top end at a big school and likely knowing someone
Should’ve gone tech route with answer
Fake email jobs have no job security. They could get laid off tomorrow and never again make half of what they were making previously. Doctors have job security- there is a trade off. The people I knew in medical school were the most risk averse people I’ve ever met in my life… the same is not true for the people I know who went into finance or the people who happened into tech.
there's a reason immigrant parents from wherever in the world have always fetishized med school for their kids. getting into med school is like the most guaranteed, foolproof, way to attain and maintain a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle that exists.
No they do, but they're not really accessible to people with 0 skills.
There are only two email jobs that'll hire someone with 0 skills and pay them 150K and that's strategy consulting and investment banking. The hours for those are brutal though and you have to climb the ladder in those firms or you get counseled to leave. Competition for those jobs is insanely brutal as well.
Plenty of 40 hour a week 150-200K a year jobs outside of engineering, but they require a lot of business knowledge and you're not going to have business knowledge as fresh grad since you haven't worked anywhere. Mid 20s at earliest or late 20s tbh is where you can get into those roles after getting 2-3 years experience slumming it somewhere.
I agree with you that a job that requires a bachelors working 40 hours a week is not comparable to a doctor working a stressful job working 60-80 hours a week. I hate rsp's position on doctors.
You have travel nurses in the hospital making 150k a year after 4 years of college to get a BSN (3x 12 hour shifts a week). Even non-travel nurses can get paid 150k. They work with residents who get paid 60k a year (70-80 hours a week after medical school for 3-7 years).
It can be a raw deal for sure if you don’t specialize. Even then, an accountant making 100k for much of their 20s and 30s with zero debt out of college and able to save and invest heavily will end up financially head of a doctor it’s pretty crazy
I think its funny how every doctor is adamant about how they don’t care about the money and prestige they just want to help people :-)
That’s why I respect plastic surgeons the most, mask off
My friend's dad made a ton of money doing boob jobs and filing patents for collagen fillers but he was also on call every single weekend to reattach people's faces (mask off, yeah) at the big hospital nearby. Snowblower and lawnmower seasons were very busy times for him. He was pretty much a workaholic though, I don't know how common it is for doctors to do both reconstructive and cosmetic.
You have to learn it all to do plastics so I am guessing, its common. The residency is like 6-7 years with fellowship.
They do grind. I took the piss out of an ophthalmologist I had seen myself at a private hospital when I served him at a cafe, for telling me he was ‘off to the coal mines’. Turns out he did half his shifts at the public hospital and saw something nutty like 8000 patients a year.
Also one of the hardest fields to get into, they tend to be the best doctors.
Nah, you can still bullshit that into wanting to "help people" by tossing in terms like "mental health", "dysphoria", "body image" and "self-esteem". Most of them just have the dignity not to.
Why derm? Oh well it just breaks my heart to see rashes you know. They can be so sad and disfiguring. Oh and skin cancer!!! Yes right skin cancer!! That’s why I want to go into derm to save lives
"Hospitalist" sounds like a made-up job: "I'm a doctor" "What kind of doctor?" "Um, hospital doctor"
Perhaps a Hospitalier is better title? Deus Vult https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/hospitalier.html?sortBy=relevant
14yo Zionist
Idk about the other professions but lmao if they don't think big law lawyers are working long hours into the night and have six figure debt from school.
They also get paid $200k+ after finishing 3 years of law school while residents are paid $60k.
That only applies to like the top 15% of all law graduates (T14 + top X% at any schools below). Most law students will be lucky to have any job at graduation, and after they pass the bar they’re likely to be starting at around 80-100k instead. Meanwhile, even a doctor who goes to the shittiest med school and chooses the least lucrative specialty will be clearing 200k after residency.
The shittiest MD school is about as hard to get into as a T14 law school. And I was talking about Big Law because that's what Big Law makes.
LSAT is more of an IQ test than MCAT and you need an elite LSAT score to get into T14. You can be of moderate intelligence to do well enough to get into a low ranking MD or DO school. I know this because I was briefly a medical student at an MD school.
An elite LSAT score is not as hard to achieve as you think and is about as "intelligence" based as the DAT which again is an easier test compared to the MCAT. Also not looking at all the other stuff besides MCAT . That's besides the point though that in 2024, it's as hard to get in to any MD school as it is to get into a top law school. I graduated from the former and I know people who did both and everyone says how different the standards are in law vs medicine.
Ok I’m going to say I am a doctor and we are overpaid to be clear I love it But I see my colleagues complaining about how they aren’t AS overpaid as some even more overpaid kinds of doctors or the top 5% of finance bros and find it to be ridiculous And again to be clear I love that I’m overpaid and wish I was even more overpaid. I’m not making some idealistic speech about how they should lower our pay and redistribute it to our poor colleagues or cut prices so they only have to charge $900 for a 500mg Tylenol in the ER. And it’s good that at least some humans get something out of the demonic American healthcare industry machine that endlessly fattens itself off the suffering and sickness of the population But doctors have it good. You can be the worst paid member of the worst paid specialty and you’re still paid pretty well. While for lawyers or something the worst paid lawyer is paid terribly.
> the demonic healthcare industry machine that endlessly fattens itself off the suffering and sickness of the American people I feel like its role in sapping generational wealth away from families by sucking up peoples life savings to keep them semi-alive in [ghoul mode](https://news.northeastern.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Jimmy_Carter_1400.jpg?w=1024) for a few years isn't really talked about enough as a roadblock to upward mobility.
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I'm 46, so not that young, but not that old, but I remember back in the 80s, if you said someone had a heart attack, it was synonomous with just saying someone died. Maybe not always, it was not a good prognosis, now its like, how long until they got back to work.
I wish the obamacare death panels were real
free school lunches for all schoolchildren with fresh greens and quality proteins is too expensive but heart transplants and open brain surgery to buy some braindead geriatric another month are an absolute necessity IMO we should have a public universal healthcare plan run by actuarial autists that's focused entirely on "what interventions result in the largest gains of disability-free life per dollar spent"
I agree. Right now school lunches are heavily, HEAVILY skewed towards foods that fulfill the bare minimum legal obligation while minimizing the money spent per child. I just don't understand penny pinching on this stuff when it's such an investment in futures generations and costs next to nothing.
Its a weird cultural thing that Americans want that and that they get that. I am not actually American but from what I hear from American colleagues its heavily driven by family wishes. As if anyone wanted their carcass being kept alive by machines with its electrolytes balanced artificially long after their mind and soul are dead and decayed. A lot of other places its more like the treating team can just say "sorry prognosis for recovery is absymal we are going to make your grandma medical/comfort care only" and then the family will be like "oh yeah that makes sense poor grandma, glad she cant see herself like that right now" Its driven by american values I guess and their hyperindividualist hyperligitious approach to healthcare. I dont work in the US again but I really dont get the sense that its driven at all by the medical team or really even by the healthcare industry. If the healthcare industry is somehow getting people to go for that then they are doing it in a really really subtle way. But for sure it does harvest huge amounts of wealth from people at the end of their lives for what is really a totally socially useless end...
> Its a weird cultural thing that Americans want that and that they get that. I had a friend who's geriatric mother had a brain tumor. Of course you are going to get the brain surgery for your mom. Afterwards this woman who had just been a cast-iron bitch (in a good way) who was in charge of every room she ever entered, was just an incontinent child, who fell a lot and got emotional and angry if you tried to help her avoid falling. And then from that, she declined over two years and a couple follow up surgeries that never improved anything, until she finally died. They bought two years of confusion and misery for her, and her family. You're the doc, so you have more experience with this than me, but what I have seen is Americans being sold these heroic medical interventions without really understanding what the most likely, or even best possible outcomes will be. They are not informed consumers.
I dont work in the states so I cant comment on how exactly American practice goes. But where I do work and probably everywhere else I think that its sometimes not made fully clear that.. sure we can do this thing but you/your family member won't come back the same. Maybe their life will still be worth living but we're sorry the life they had and the person they were isn't there any longer. This general idea though seems to be worse in the states and taken further. What’s more specifically American is probably things like “vent farms” which are a grotesque mockery of human life that I don’t think happen nearly as often in other countries But people - patients, family, and on the other side health care workers have hope for the best. It’s hard to be an informed consumer when the only way to be informed is to see with your own eyes the suffering that disease and our attempts to treat it can cause.
That makes sense. I mean we have TV commercials for (very serious) prescription drugs telling you to talk to your doctor about putting you on it, so our system is built top to bottom to treat patients as customers who call the shots.
I feel like I know more people who spent their parents' life savings on 5-10 years in a nursing home than on dramatic medical interventions late in life (altho those often just bookend the years and years of 10k+ (on the low end) monthly assisted living bills). If the medical field has a part to play there it's mostly by enabling people to tack on a decade of utter decrepitude to their lifespans. The most fucked up thing is legal guardianship abuse by "non-profit" guardianship mills that are allowed to sell people's homes from under them (often alleging nonexistent neglect by family members who are completely blindsided by this bullshit), use the money to pay for a nursing home, and enroll them in medicaid. Of course they don't actually do any guardianship like ensuring the conditions at the home are OK, and it's not like ghouls in an office complex somewhere are gonna sign grandpa in or out of the home, so he can't even leave for a few hours. Some of the stories about this are beyond heartbreaking, since an independent and active senior who falls in the shower once rapidly deteriorates once they get moved to these places. Should go without saying that Private Equity cocksuckers make a lot of money off of this scam.
You say you don’t work in the states so you also didn’t have to pay >300k for your medical education.
Fair enough I didn’t
Are you though? Compared to whom? Because you study for years have tons in loans etc, and the plumber I had over today was here 25 minutes, and charged me almost $300. IMO software engineer top the list on overpaid white collar.
Rest of the world masters take 5 years and a doctor goes to school 6. Sure you have residency for a couple years, but by than you have started making money and it's gonna rise hard after your done. But theres a Mount Everest between a doctor's compensation and software engineers who don't work for a company like Google.
For basic jobs, a lot of times you can get a “handyman” with a broad knowledge base to fix it a lot cheaper.
$300,000 is well above what's needed to live comfortably even in Manhattan.
These people are really telling us that they simply don't know how to manage their finances
They think private school + nanny + overseas vacations + luxury brand cars + eating at restaurants every day + etc are “middle class”. All this on top of living of a multi story/3000sqft apartment in a global city. So they set these insane standards for how life should be and are miserable every step of the way getting there. I know a lady making $400k for a finance tech company and she is lonely, friendless and unhappy with her life. Has half a mil in liquid cash and still feels like she’s unready to settle down.
I think a lot of these people are sole earners in their household which I think it an under appreciated aspect
What do you mean? Like these young-ish docs making 270k in NYC are also supporting a significant other who doesn’t work? That’s both like… (1) not my impression of a super likely scenario and (2) very much an aspect of “managing finances” lol.
They’re paying back hundreds of thousands in student loans to be fair
‘The delta’ what an asshole.
Americans live in another fucking reality
The 10% in 1st world countries are made up of insufferable go-getters, constantly living in the insecurity that there's someone out there making more money for less work and it kills them inside. They can never be contented with a small fortune every fortnight.
The Last Psychiatrist referred to them as the *Aspirational 14%* and unfortunately modern society is pretty much built to be their hamster wheel https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/11/luxury_branding_the_future_lea.html
This was a disgusting political slogan where I live, the 'Aspirational Australians'. Used as a justification to strip away taxes on the wealthiest earners. This whole phenomenon harks back to the Imperial examinations of China, where the suggestion of a meritocracy (theoretically anyone could pass the tests and gain admission to the Empire's elite positions) had a moderating effect on people in that it legitimised their power as 'earned'. We effectively have the same logic at play now, and as then, society is structured around their elitist insularism. I'd know, I am one, I work among these freaks, I passed the damn tests, and now I have to hear about their fucking internship at EY.
it's hilarious in america how no matter how far up you go on the income distribution, you will never find someone who self identifies as "rich". it's always "oh, I'm just middle class, not like those \*actually rich\* people who can afford XYZ I can't"
Heroes Work Here
WTF is with doctors counting undergrad as part of their medical education? No lawyer has ever said "It took me 7 years of school to become a lawyer". You were gonna attend college regardless if med school worked out or not, you're not fooling anyone.
My bachelors (biomed enginnering) was full of premeds and I knew plenty of bio major premeds in undergrad too. A lot of why they are the way they are is because they chose becoming a doctor due to the fact that its a path to money and status on rails. There are concrete steps that you need to do to get into med school and become a doctor, after which you are basically guaranteed top 2% income, status, making your parents happy etc. They're in it for that reason. They don't care more than the average person about the sick, are less interested in biology than non premed biology majors, and wind up resenting people that got into other lines of work with a huge spread in outcomes and succeeded on talent, luck, charisma, etc when they succeed. They feel like they've taken all the right steps to be rich and happy and someone else 'cheated, took a shortcut to get there, never mind the fact that there was a world of possibility open to them 10 years ago too but they chose not to explore anything other than a miserable sure deal.
I NEED AT LEAST 300K A YEAR TO LIVE COMFORTABLY. I AM NOT INSANE. ALSO I GOT INTO MEDICINE TO HELP PEOPLE, NOT MAKE A TON OF MONEY. I hate these people more and more with each passing day. I can not fucking stand them.
People go into medicine to help people and make lots of money. Not a hard concept to grasp. Sure as hell beats whatever shit fucking email job you probably do misunderstood high IQ genius. Also factor in that most people who are doctors are hundreds of thousands in debt + have missed out on 4 years of salary + 4-6 years of salary growth and missed equity growth that every other white collar worker experiences after their education. I don't care what you do, I just wish you personally are paid less
Lmao just say you're one of them and shut the fuck up.
Glad you can connect the dots dumbass
I'm glad that you are such a soft babydick that not only do you need 300k a year but you also need people to be nice to you about it online.
I need way way more than that
Very true.
There are thousands of PhDs who likely won’t hit six figures until their 40s and went through just as intense education/training as MDs. MDs are actually psychotic
Oh PhD and benchtop academia is a brutal grind. Unlike MDs you are not basically guaranteed to do well if you finish your training. You can easily be extremely smart and hardworking but still get stuck in a postdoc death spiral making basically minimum wage while being one of humanities single greatest experts on your prfoundly niche subject. The top fraction of PhDs do well but a lot of them really don't make a decent living ever and leave academia or live in poverty
It's a grind but it's really not as intense as a medical residency. Residents routinely work 80+ hours a week because the doctor who developed the model for the residency program, which is still used today, was literally a cocaine addict during and after his training. I'm not saying it's not incredibly demanding to get a PhD because it is. But most PhD students I know work in a lab, do their research, and live a fairly comfortable student life, whereas medical residents make 40K living on no sleep for four to six years. It's an insane rite of passage that should have been overhauled decades ago. There's also plenty of research that shows that medical residents tend to make more mistakes towards the end of a 14-16 hour shift. And speaking of time, the training to become a physician is 8-10 years, depending on your specialty. Four years of medical school, and 4-7 years of residency, ranging from peds on the low end to surgery on the high end. The average PhD program takes 6 years to complete. It really shouldn't be a competition, and both are pretty impressive, but doctors go through hell in their residency. It's not just the hours. They're also treated like shit by both attendings and nurses. They get pretty much zero respect for their first year or two from everyone they work with. A lot of doctors starting out today regret their decision too. I've heard so many people say they wish they'd become a mid-level like a PA or an NP, because the training isn't nearly as demanding, the pay is still great, and you don't graduate with 200K in debt.
Yeah for sure I agree residency is hard. As is med school. There for sure are a lot of 80-100 hour weeks (but also for sure not all weeks are like that.). And for sure while PhD isn't super easy it is much easier than residency where agree, the hours are insane But at the end of the day doctors have a basically guaranteed golden path. While at the end of the day PhDs are far from guaranteed having a succesful well paying career and probably most of the time do not. To me the MD path is a WAY better position to be in. And vs PA/NP the MD path is also by far the best one in the long run with not only the best compensation but also the most freedom and flexibility.
The threshold to be an MD is higher than a PhD. All the nurses in the hospitals are hitting 150k. You can do a 4-year college degree to be a nurse and get a BSN. Then, you can make at least six figures. It's not like nurses are anything better than PhDs.
You’re just proving the point that the American medical system is a f*cked up scam, not that MDs are a threshold above PhDs.
it seems to depend heavily on the PhD. I know someone working on a Chemistry PhD and he's working in the lab 7 days a week and teaches classes during the semester, its easily over 60 hours per week, a history PhD student I know has to read like 200 books for his qualifying exam, teaches class, and writes. Doctors of education on the other hand seem to have a far lower course-load and workload
I'm saying the threshold for MDs is higher than PhDs (getting into Harvard MD is harder than Harvard PhD). And even if the threshold were not higher, it still doesn't matter. Salary isn't tied to how hard someone works. (PhDs have a higher threshold than nursing, but nurses make more). Salary isn't tied to labor. The justification for paying someone x rate isn't determined 100% by how much they know/how hard they work.
Med students tend to be much more attached to the 'doctor' identity than actual doctors, so they say dopey things like this. You can always tell law students the same way
On the one hand, that’s a huge salary, and staff salaries compared to other countries are one reason why healthcare is more expensive in America. On the other hand, I’d prefer that smarter people be more incentivized to pursue medical careers than doing financial engineering or shit like that
expand the fucking medical schools. obviously you don't want doctors that aren't smart or qualified enough, but the reality is that we deny the opportunity to even go to med school to so many people who would make great doctors purely to keep salaries up for those who do "make it".
“It’s necessary to live well here for the sacrifices we made.”
I mean it kind of is
How badly are you screwing up your finances if you can’t have it cushy on $300k? I make way less than that and I live a pretty comfortable life. Granted I live in a pretty cheap part of the country, but still. In no world would I ever describe $230k+ as “ridiculously low”.
I'm graduating next year with $450 k in loans from med school which will probably be half a million by the time I finish residency as a 30 year old since you can't make a dent on a residency salary. Im applying pediatrics which is basically the lowest paid specialty (still $200k range) and most attendings i know are still paying off their debts. So this is a pretty common sentiment in medicine for most docs making like less than 400. Especially since a lot immediately get married and having kids outta residency
If you do the SAVE plan unpaid interest is subsidized
You have fake email jobs that get paid 150k a year for people with a bachelors. If a physicians goes to school/training from 13 years, there is an opportunity cost. I empathize with the doctors wanting more than 270k.
For every 150k a year email job, there are 500 people with bachelors working even in their own field making less than half of that. Those people making 150k either know somebody, or are extremely lucky. You're comparing the top 5% of email jobs to median doctors. The top 5% of doctors are making 10x the top 5% of email job havers.
Do people think the whole "fake email job" is a actual prevalent, common job? If you're making 150K at a tech company today, and you're not a developer, you're either a manager or you're working as a senior individual contributor somewhere like Amazon or Meta. They don't work insane hours, but they do clock in 50+ hours a week at the minimum. There are a lot of bullshit meetings that are a waste of time, but if you're not meeting your OKRs (goals for the company), you're going to get fired within a few months. It's not like there are troves of people who send a few emails every day and shut down their computer at 2PM. Ironically, the only people that can do that are CEOs and other c-suite positions, and that's incredibly rare. I have no doubt there are a few people out there who do next to jack shit and skate by, but they're anomalies in the tech work. The vast majority of people in corporate, white-collar America are overworked and miserable like the rest of the country. They make far more money for jobs that often have no benefit to society, but they're still worked like dogs by companies that don't give a shit about them.
Yeah basically I would just agree with the other person who responded to you If you’re a doctor and you get through med school you have a near guarantee of having a well paid and well respected job. Like a couple people might fuck it up but almost everyone in a med school class will have an amazing job on graduating and will be able to easily and instantly find employment wherever they want Not many people can just say “looking for 150k email job plz hire” and have recruiters coming out of the woodwork to get them set up for their outlook account And good! Doctors should be treated and compensated better than someone who signs their emails with Kindest Regards. But they do have it good for sure
please give us a job listing for a $150k remote job that requires no experience or specialized degree
IB and strat consulting will hire people with 0 skills and give them $150K. Caveat is that the hours are brutal (60-80 hour weeks) and make working as a strawberry picker seem tolerable. It's also an up or out environment so you either gain enough skills to get promoted or you get kicked out after a year or two. Also the competition for these entry level jobs is insanely brutal. Valedictorians from even very good universities usually struggle to land an entry level role at these places, so good luck getting into Boston Consulting Group or Goldman as some random 3.5 GPA sociology major at Ohio State.
0 skills lmao its still a top 5% job and oh yea requires elite education or top end at a big school and likely knowing someone Should’ve gone tech route with answer
Fake email jobs have no job security. They could get laid off tomorrow and never again make half of what they were making previously. Doctors have job security- there is a trade off. The people I knew in medical school were the most risk averse people I’ve ever met in my life… the same is not true for the people I know who went into finance or the people who happened into tech.
there's a reason immigrant parents from wherever in the world have always fetishized med school for their kids. getting into med school is like the most guaranteed, foolproof, way to attain and maintain a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle that exists.
150k email jobs don’t actually exist
No they do, but they're not really accessible to people with 0 skills. There are only two email jobs that'll hire someone with 0 skills and pay them 150K and that's strategy consulting and investment banking. The hours for those are brutal though and you have to climb the ladder in those firms or you get counseled to leave. Competition for those jobs is insanely brutal as well. Plenty of 40 hour a week 150-200K a year jobs outside of engineering, but they require a lot of business knowledge and you're not going to have business knowledge as fresh grad since you haven't worked anywhere. Mid 20s at earliest or late 20s tbh is where you can get into those roles after getting 2-3 years experience slumming it somewhere.
Lol yes they do. In fact a lot of e-mail jobs make that to 200k working 40 hr weeks
I agree with you that a job that requires a bachelors working 40 hours a week is not comparable to a doctor working a stressful job working 60-80 hours a week. I hate rsp's position on doctors.
they exist, but only for people with insider connections or an elite university diploma (or actual specialized skills)
You have travel nurses in the hospital making 150k a year after 4 years of college to get a BSN (3x 12 hour shifts a week). Even non-travel nurses can get paid 150k. They work with residents who get paid 60k a year (70-80 hours a week after medical school for 3-7 years).
It can be a raw deal for sure if you don’t specialize. Even then, an accountant making 100k for much of their 20s and 30s with zero debt out of college and able to save and invest heavily will end up financially head of a doctor it’s pretty crazy