Medicine can satisfy your desire for human
service by enabling you to bring help
and comfort to others. Medicine can satisfy your
desire to work in a profession that has
prestige. While prestige is no longer granted
automatically, it does come with the faith-
ful discharge of responsibilities and
obligations. Medicine can also satisfy your desire
for a substantial income. This income, which is
superior to that of most other profes-
sions, is earned by the long and difficult hours
demanded of the physician. Medicine is a
profession that can, to a significant extent,
satisfy your desire for independent and indi-
vidual achievement in a society that is
becoming increasingly overstructured.
An MD degree and the completion of all three
components of the United States
Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) enables
you to practice medicine anywhere
in the United States. With this degree, you can
care for people at all stages: you can
bring them into the world, treat their
childhood and young adult illnesses, help them
deal with their middle-age crises, and assist
them in coping with the increasingly fre-
quent and troublesome illnesses of advancing
years.
If teaching appeals to you, you can enjoy
guiding the next generation of physicians.
Educating medical students, residents, and
postdoctoral fellows will enhance your own
creative abilities and stimulate your own
thought processes.
If you have a flair for writing, there is a
vast potential to use literary expression in
writing lucid scientific papers, analytic
essays, or even nonscientific works. Just remem-
ber the background of Arthur Conan Doyle, W.
Somerset Maugham, or Lewis Thomas,
to mention a few prominent
physician-writers.
Should laboratory work be more to your liking,
with suitable postdoctoral training
(or an MD-PhD degree), you may want to become
involved in valuable research that
can lead to finding cures for diseases and
possible disease prevention. Much work is
being done today in the field of genetic
engineering, which impacts greatly on congeni-
tal disorders and various metabolic
abnormalities.
Medicine therefore represents the broadest
spectrum of opportunities for an individ-
ual to render service to others while at the
same time attaining his or her own goals in
life in a satisfying manner. Medicine provides
the widest range of career options in a
variety of roles, such as small-town doctor,
family practitioner, specialist, superspecial-
ist, clinical investigator, academician, public
health officer, administrator, and varying
combinations of these positions. Making the
choice, rather than having the choice, is the
issue medical students and residents face at
some point in their training.
Bottom Line
The profession of medicine offers physicians
many specific advantages. These include
· respect from patients whose lives they
seek to help.
· an opportunity to gain much personal
satisfaction by using one's knowledge, tal-
ents, and skills to enhance the well-being of
others.
· the option of being able to select
from the wide variety of possible career path-
ways that medical specialties and
subspecialties offer.
· an opportunity to set up a practice in
a wide variety of possible geographic loca-
tions and select the type of practice one
prefers.
· being assured of receiving, in due
course, a steady income that can provide a com-
fortable life.
THE REALITY OF A PHYSICIAN'S CAREER
_________________________
On average, the professional career of a
physician can extend close to 40 years, as-
suming he or she starts to practice at 27 and
retires at 65. Obviously, quite a number of
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