Seeking Less Demanding Specialties
A short-but-excellent piece on NPR discusses the trend of medical students changing their preferences for specialties. It’s worth the 8 minutes.
I think the piece is right–my generation has very different priorities than my parents’ generation. While we’re just as hard-working and driven, we want to have a more of a life. We want balance. Or maybe we just want it all–seeing patients, of course–but also families, social lives, and hobbies. I also think it’s unfortunate–and dangerous–to be pumping out such a small number of primary care doctors. But we clearly reward specialists with higher pay and, in many cases, better “hours.” We’re in big trouble in 20-30 years, when the millions of baby boomers need primary care, but all we’ve got is specialists.
I believe I’m ultimately very priveleged to be granted the opportunity to pursue a career in medicine–to receive more education than 99% of the rest of the world–and along with that comes a responsibility. Sacrifice. But ultimately, I want what everyone else wants: time to spend with my family and friends, and time to do the things I enjoy. We’re so focused on the scientific and causational in medical school that religion seems further and further from the truth; if we really only get one turn in this thing called life, I don’t want to miss out on it all. As always, it’s finding the balance that’s the key.
Thanks for the link. Do you have any leanings? Probably much too early.
I’m not going to listen to 8 minutes of NPR to hear what they say (I’ll break out in hives at 3 minutes), but the specialty picking problem is worse than you think. It’s well known that some specialties are more challenging than others, and the ones that are particularly difficult because of the nature of the problems dealt with are being less pursued by residents. The more challenging fields such as general surgery (my field), medical oncology, OB are less popular, while some who once pursued one of these fields might go for ENT or urology, dermatology, or radiology. I don’t blame anyone for going for what will please them, but I will hope that someone will take care of my cancer when I need him or her.
Republican readers may want to take a deep breath, or simply not read on, but I think this may be a good example of when some non-economically binding entity such as the government needs to step in and do something. The health care system is broken, both for doctors and patients. Everybody is loosing, period. Even if you are rich and can afford the best oncologists in the country, in 20 years you may still have missed a golden opportunity to prevent cancer by not being treated by good primary care physician. It would be great if the health care industry and medical community could self regulate and solve this problem without public intervention. That’s the idea of a free market anyway…so will it happen?
Path of Least Resistance….
With a hat-tip to Graham (like the new look, BTW) for this link to a NPR story on the choices being made by fourth-year medical students across the country:Med Students Seeking Less-Demanding Specialties.
If you are primary care supportive, you should check out this sight if you have not already: http://www.graham-center.org/
go to the “One-liners” for terse assessment of the problem(s)
BTW, appreciate your single-payer show … may want to download it for use in a PNHP presentation, if that’s okay w/you.
thanks,
chris