[cloverich]

Yeah but in all fairness that's only a couple years and is where most of your learning will occur.

Moreover, if the ama didn't limit the supply of physicians to boost salary, you could get better hours (post resident) at the cost of lower salary (still over 100k). Is that a trade you think most physicians want?

[PhasmaFelis]

> Yeah but in all fairness that's only a couple years and is where most of your learning will occur.

Oh, well that makes sense then. People learn best when they're depressed and sleep-deprived, right?

[kamaal]

No but in general you tend to get serious and learn a lot in difficult and pressing situations than other wise. It ends up being stressful, but good things come out of it. This is not a long term strategy, but works for a few weeks/months.

When I started my career, I went into a very famous IT firm here in India. Being from a non-CS background they put us through a grueling training schedule. Which together with the course work, assignments, project work, tests, interviews and exams put us on a 20 hour schedule for around 3-4 months- Failure means getting fired, and in this country where getting jobs is quite difficult for a fresher that was not even an option. We stayed in the campus hostel, pretty much training and occasional recreation is what we did.

Guess what even after 7-8 years later, the biggest edge I hold over my peers is that training. Basically because we went through every thing there is about out there. At the end, we might have gained what one would gain after 2-3 years of working in a few months. Needless to say that set a new bench mark for us, knowing we had absorbed the difficult and come out strong- You change into a different person.

[fizx]

You don't learn facts well. But you learn how to cope with extreme stress. Apparently the medical field values that. Some life-or-death surgeries are many hours long, so it makes some sense that this would be the case.

[droopyEyelids]

What percent of doctors do you think have do deal with hour long life-or-death surgeries? .5%? 5%?

[fizx]

The general-practice doctors I know all have stories about them. They're not uncommon. Also, doctors have on-call rotations. People get shot, stabbed, in car accidents, etc at all hours. So odds are that even if you avoid the planned long surgeries, you'll still have a low-sleep surgery at some point.

[collyw]

Most at some point in their training.