Money, Lifestyle, or Prestige???

If you're entering medicine for money, lifestyle, or prestige, you will probably be disappointed when you see the reality versus the trumped-up TV version of being a physician. There aren't a whole lot of FM jobs that are no call - there are a few outpatient only jobs out there, but not as common as traditional inpatient/outpatient mix. If you do accept inpatient assigment, you will get paged over and over every time one of yours shows up to the ER. It's usually pretty hard work for 150k a year. Internal medicine has no money? Have you ever heard of cardiologists? Ditto the dude who said choose a specialty because you're willing to do it every day for the rest of your life. More likely than not, you will find that medical school, residency, and actual practice consume way more of your life than you think it will. If you're looking for money, lifestyle, or prestige get into dentistry, law, business, etc. If you want to work like crazy to serve your patients, get into med. That's the way it really is, all the unrealistic posts on here aside. Most of you folks who think 150k a year is appropriate compensation for a physician probably haven't ever tried to pay any loans back or run a household with serious expenses (eg, more than one person in it). 150k doesn't last long under these conditions - trust me. Prestige is a joke, a travesty. What is prestigious to one is junk to another. Lifestyle in medicine is a fallacy. By the time you get through with medical school and residency, you won't remember what having a normal life was like. Getting into med for money is crazy. Medicare is about to go broke, and we're about to all be working exclusively for either insurance companies or the government, neither of which pay more than they absolutely have to. Orthopedics has a decent lifestyle - is that another joke on here? They get paged for every car accident in town all night long.

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Money, Lifestyle, or Prestige???