| Topic Name: |
life as a physician |
| Message Name: |
not out of touch |
| Date Posted: |
04/23/2001 |
| In Reply To: |
To think that doctors are being shortchanged in any way would suggest that you are out of touch with other professions and indeed out of touch with your own. Your salary is ceratinly no refelction of what a doctor should expect to earn in private practice. Due to the artificial regulation of doctors numbers, doctors find it relatively easily to open up shop privately and before long they are raking it in. A friend of mine, an opthalmologist, charges $900 to remove a cataract, a procedure that takes him about 10 minutes. There a mega bucks to be made in medicine.
Go ahead lament the money your earning but I guarantee you, had you entered any other field you would have starved to death long ago! The fallacy that doctors don't make money is one promoted by the AMA so as to avoid anti-competitive scrutiny. The AMA is the strongest union in the world and should be illegal! |
| Message: |
First, I didn't suggest that doctors are being "shortchanged". I'm merely saying that medicine is not a field to enter (in general) if you are primarily interested in making money (and not interested in a lot of debt). Using ophthalmology as an example of physician incomes is not appropriate, since they clearly make much more than the average doc, and certainly much, much more than the average primary care (pediatrics, gyn, internal med). Yes, you CAN make some money in medicine, but ophthalmology is a limited, very competitive field.
I doubt that I would have "starved to death" in any other field, and I don't see what that has to do with this discussion.
Additionally, I'm not a fan of the AMA (or a member), but it is not a "union" in any sense of the word. The AMA isn't promoting that doctors don't make money, either. And what exactly do you mean by "artifical regulation of doctors numbers"???
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