7 Reasons NOT to go to Medical School

Money

If you are after the high salary, consider other career options. A bachelor’s degree costs hundreds of thousands of dollars less than a medical degree. A bachelor’s in engineering, computer science, accounting, business… the list goes on. There are plenty of degrees that can get you jobs immediately after college. While they may not pay $800k like cardiothoracic surgeon, you will make money right away and not take on further debt. 

Consider the 4 years of school + 3 years of residency as 7+ years of lost earning potential in any other job. Plus, most people have undergraduate and medical school loans to pay off too. 

You’re a “doer”

If you have the stamina and appeal to get into medical school, you can do anything you set your mind to. Want to be a CEO of a tech company? You can do it. CFO of an investing company? Research director of a laboratory? You got it. 

Many years will be spent in school where you are studying books, and not actually using your hands to practice medicine. Even after graduation, much of your day will be spent at a computer putting in orders, writing notes, and reading charts. Studying and learning never ends. Computer work never ends. While you will get to spend time with patients and do procedures, you

One of my classmates from first year left two weeks in and decided to become a cath lab technician instead of a doctor–-he is saving money, making money sooner, and doing something hands-on that saves lives.

No idea what to do besides become a doctor? I recommend the book What Color is your Parachute. I’m serious, go read it. Like, right now.

You Need Stability

Medical school is a solid 4 years of instability in every way you can imagine. 

Your finances will be in the toilet and you will barely scrape by some months after paying your rent, utilities, and eating as much free food as you can find on campus. Plenty of parents graduate medical school every year, but understand that if you are supporting a family, you’ll need a really solid plan to get through these 4 years. Even without kids to support, money is tight, and it gets old fast.

Your relationships with family and friends will take a hit. School-life-balance exists and can be attained to a certain extent. Come second year of medical school, when you are preparing for board exams, you will be drowning in work and may only have half a day per week to spend on anything except school. You will have great bonding time while you study with your classmates, but outside of school, your relationships will be stressed. There just isn’t enough time in the day to put 100% into friendships and relationships while also giving 100% to school. And if you don’t give 100% to school you might not make it.

Your schedule may seem “regular” for the first two years of school. After that, depending where you attend, you might be moving across the state every month for your clinical rotations. Fourth year, you may be moving across the country every month to do audition rotations and residency interviews. 

Your sleep schedule will be wacky. You will either gain weight or lose weight. You won’t have much time for your hobbies. 

Every regular, reliable, scheduled thing in your life will be turned upside down. Truly consider if you want to do it.

After medical school, things arguably get worse. Residents work 40-80 hours a week on paper, but hours can often be longer than that depending on the residency. The shortest residencies are 3 years, but if you have your eye on a surgical sub-specialty it can be even longer. Cardiothoracic surgeons spend 5 years in general surgery residency, then another 3 years specializing.  That can mean twelve full years after undergrad of school and training before you are an attending with a great salary and more power over your own schedule.

If you thrive on stability, think again.

Prestige

This goes for every job. Don’t do it for the accolades. If you only want to pursue a job (doctor, lawyer, engineer, teacher, police officer, pastor) because you want people to respect you or give you kudos, don’t do it. 

Being a physician is not about shaking hands and kissing babies. You will be overworked, treated poorly by patients and by your hospital system, and at the end of the day you cannot expect anyone to say “thank you” or “I’m sorry.” 

Instead of chasing prestige, figure out what you really like to do. What do you want to spend your workday doing, even if nobody looks up to you for it? If you are alone in a vacuum, what are you going to do to be productive?

Family pressure

Mom and Dad’s pride will not be enough fuel to get you through medical school, no less residency. So your parents are pediatricians. Your cousin is an anesthesiologist. Grandpa was a surgeon. You know what? Your grandpa was a surgeon because he wanted to be. You should only pursue it if you REALLY want to be a physician.

Your parents will be proud of you for pursuing a career that you actually care about. Seeing you happy and successful doing something you want to do should bring your family more joy than anything. And if not, consider how you can reframe those relationships such that familial pressure will not sway you to do something that makes you unhappy.

Peer pressure

You are a premed student, and so is your roommate, and your best friend from high school. Oh, you live on the honor’s science floor of your dorm? So all 20 of you are premed, and you all sit in the front row of the chemistry lecture hall?

Cool. Take your peers out of the equation. Take the competition out of the equation. Do you enjoy biology? Do you like the challenge of problem solving? In all honesty, do you like school? Would you be having fun as a premed student if you weren’t surrounded by other premed students? What about if you only got 70% on every single test you took? Would bad grades make you dislike learning?

Don’t get me wrong; there is an enormous amount of camaraderie in medical school. You will do everything with your classmates. But if you are like me, and many other people, you will be facing a lot of it alone. Your friends from undergrad, old coworkers, old high school friends… they will all be taking vacations and having kids while you are studying away. Your medical school peers will be with you every step of the way, but the people you’ve known and loved longer will not be doing the same thing as you. Will you still want to do medical school when you are feeling peer pressure to go on a cruise in Greece instead? 

You want to help people

Hear me out on this one. A physician gets to make the ultimate decisions about the care a person receives when they are ill, injured, and infirm. They get to prescribe medications to heal disease and improve quality of life. Surgeons can save lives in a matter of hours.

As a hospitalist, for example, you will be responsible for someone’s health to the point that they are stable enough to be discharged home or to a long-term care facility. In the ED, you stabilize them to the point they can go to inpatient care, or go home. In primary care, someone comes to you with hypertension or diabetes and you prescribe them pills to take for the rest of their lives– and often they won’t take them. Sometimes medicine doesn’t work. Your patients won’t listen to you all the time. The treatments you provide might only prolong someone’s life a few months, and not even give them good quality of life. Someone with a torn ACL can get surgery and rehab, but that knee will never be the same.

Sorry to be a negative Nancy on this one. Doctors do help people. But so do many many other professions. Almost every job in the medical industry is helpful to people’s health– nurses, respiratory therapists, facilities managers, the list goes on. And outside of medicine, opportunities are endless. Any job helps people if you like the job enough and commit yourself to it.