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"None of these reasons should have stopped any decent doctor from taking the path. "

Here's part of the problem. You don't know what it's like to be a doctor, until you become a doctor. I think that's somewhat unique to the field. You can go into it with the right intentions, but it's not like people doctor as a hobby or as a passion and then decide to go into it. It's not like being a musician, or a programmer, sports or pet sitting.




You don't know what it's like to be a doctor, until you become a doctor. I think that's somewhat unique to the field.

No, it's like that in a lot of fields.

Obviously, many jobs have a much lower barrier to entry than "doctor" -- it takes years of work to reach the point where you can understand what doctoring is like first-hand -- but I've found most jobs fall into one of these categories:

A) The problems with the job don't always manifest until you're months or years into it, whether it's long-term boredom, lack of opportunity for advancement, chronic occupational injury, or rare but awful events. (Soldiering is a lot more fun before you're under fire than afterwards.)

B) It's not so hard to be a happy amateur, but the amateur experience is much different from the pro experience. Pros need to make money, consistently, and that is a big constraint, often to the point that it takes an entirely different skill set. (e.g. Being a freelance programmer or musician is as much about marketing and customer service as it is about code or music, and the stuff that's valuable to customers may be boring to the point of tears for you. Ask a classical musician to tell you how they feel about the inexplicably popular Pachelbel's Canon.)

C) And, of course, jobs with barriers to entry are hard to really understand until the barriers are down. Research has a whole series of barriers: Being a science major is not like being a grad student, being a grad student is not like being a postdoc, being a postdoc is not like being a junior prof.

Mind you, though you can never know what it is really like to do a job without doing it, you can interview people and get some big hints. And you'll find that medicine is actually pretty easy to research, as careers go. The OP's points are not hidden mysteries. They have been made before. There are a lot of doctors, both successful ones and burned-out ones, and they're happy to talk. The trick is to be able to listen to what they tell you, and unfortunately there are also a lot of teachers and parents who are happy to push you into medicine regardless of what the actual doctors are telling you.




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