| I followed my wife though the whole process from college to practicing physician and even made an interview video about residency:
https://vimeo.com/97738071 I actually agree with the premise of the article, but it paints an inaccurate picture in a lot of places: "Nurses, by contrast, can start making real salaries of around $50,000 when they’re 22. Doctors can’t start making real money until they’re at least 29, and often not until they’re much older." Residents start making $50k salaries right out of medical school. It's only a 4 year delay from nurses. It's not about money. It's about quality of life. Medical school is really hard. Residency is brutal. Constant unrelenting pressure. No sleep. No personal time. That alone is the reason why becoming a doctor isn't worth it for most people. Watch the part in the video starting at 3:08 where they're half way through residency. They look like they're going to cry. I'm so glad I did those interviews because it really captures the personal sacrifices you have to make. Here's the thing that the article failed to grasp, though. If you need to be the one doing the cutting in surgery or the one pushing medicine forward with research, you have to get that MD. Some people need to be in control and call the shots. If that's you, do it. Make the sacrifices, because you won't be happy doing anything else. If you can live a fulfilled life as a nurse or PA, though, it's a much better choice for most people. |
Aside from nurse or PA, is APRN or ARNP. Not the same thing as a nurse at all.
My wife is an Advanced Practice Registered Nurse aka Nurse Practitioner. She's responsible for several hundred beds in a long term acute care facility, planning and setting the care for all these patients with the nursing staff carrying out her orders. MDs check their patients in and basically hand them off, leaving the critical care decisions in her hands while the MDs check back every 30 - 90 days, maybe. In our state she doesn't need to practice under some MD's license, she's a licensed care provider and prescriber in her own right. She spends a lot of time in differential diagnosis, being House. She's the most senior practicing medical person in the building.
As far as I can tell, today's NP is the general/internal medicine doc of the 1950s, with all the control and all the responsibility. If you want to be responsible for overall medical care for patients, rather than a particular specialty, understanding and improving patient health end to end, this seems like a reasonable way to go.