Agree that “many sorts of careers also need a village.” Yes, most careers do, really, but some more than others. My kid’s great grandfather was a physician but last one in the family. My kids are both engineers, work hard and sometimes work long hours. But, still are not on call 24/7 and holding other people’s lives in the balance. I was, frankly, glad, that neither expressed any interest in medical school. The financial sacrifice with medical school, residency, etc. was part of it but more so, worrying about the work/life balance. I admire physicians and those kids that are going to medical school. There are probably easier ways these days to make a good living. It truly is a calling.
@lookingforward that is true to an extent. But I don’t know too many careers that have had to pass laws in order to restrict the work week to <80 hrs per week (for residents).
We have some of everything on both sides of the family and while the engineers and IT/CS professions are busy and stressful it is nothing like the one who has sometimes lived at the hospital for days and days in a row.
I know several female physicians (3 different specialties), who have achieved reasonable balance, and I would characterize it as better balance than many women I know or work with in corporate America. They all have their own practice or work in a practice with other physicians where they are able to have a 4 day schedule. They are actually able to have more control over their schedules than many corporate execs I know.
My husband, brother-in-law, father, father-in-law, husband’s uncle and husband’s grandfather are/were physicians. I don’t know why people have a fantasy that the life of a physician was ever peaches and cream. It has always been hard work with long hours, and only for a few specialties, for a few decades, was it a profession that was going to make you wealthy.
The older physicians in our family had much rougher internships and residencies than young doctors do now. My father literally lived at the hospital (Charity Hospital in New Orleans) during his internship year, made something like $50 a month (I want to say it was $25, but that seems low), with free room, laundry and food. Part of his training included learning to do home deliveries. The hospital at that time (WWII) still had separate wings for whites and African Americans. After the war a bank turned him down for a house mortgage. (Couldn’t be sure he’d make enough money.) There were no rules protecting interns or residents hours. He made very little money for awhile. He was quite well off (for a small midwestern town) when he retired. He worked hellacious long hours when I was really young - on call every third or fourth night and third or fouth weekend, Saturday morning office hours, and housecalls.
My husband and his brother took military scholarships to pay for medical school, so there were no loans to repay, only a few years of service. Brother did his few years of payback, and is in a civilian practice, with its pros and cons. He is married, with four children, and lives very well on one paycheck.
My husband has made military medicine a career and has been very happy. Yes, he has deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan, but he has appreciated the opportunities to teach at a major medical institution, and to move into leadership positions that would not have been possible in a civilian practice. His hours are better, and his pay and benefits are comparable to physicians in civilian practices. We have raised three children on one paycheck.
We know many physicians, both civilian snd military, and they are happy, or not happy, and stressed or not stressed. They have gotten married and had kids during medical school, or during residency, or waited until their mid-thirties. You know, like any other group of professionals.
It is important to go into it with open eyes and a realistic attitude. Pick your specialty carefully to match your personality, and try to minimize the loans. And pick a spouse who is strong, doesn’t need to chat during the day, or even every day, and can handle life without a lot of hand-holding.
Some specialties might provide better balance than others. None of it seems easy. I can see where a trained female physician would be very valuable , even if they wanted to work less hours . Maybe not so much flexibility for a female corporate exec?
The residencies for the specialty that provides the most balance - dermatology - are crazy competitive. Dermatology is regarded as the most balanced because you can work 9-5 and there are rarely any emergencies or after hours calls. Anesthesiologists often are contracted by the hospital so they have pretty regular hours - while they may have evening shifts, they are known well in advance. I would guess ob-gyn and pediatrics are the worst in balance because you constantly have late night / emergency situations. I have had everything interrupted by H’s patients. I mean everything :/). It’s one thing if they are in labor or having a true emergency, but it’s annoying when they have diarrhea for a week and decide to call at 2 am on a Sunday, or on a Saturday night decide that they ran out of birth control that has to start up the next day.
I’m a female physician, a subspecialist in a non-surgical field. Medical school, 3 years of Residency, 3 years of Fellowship and was in private practice for 20+ years. Now doing part time hospital work and some administrative work.
The variables in terms of post residency quality of life/work life balance are
- Specialty: an ER doc or a Hospitalist (among others) work generally defined shifts. Usual seems to be 14 shifts of 12 hrs/month but one can work less than those number of shifts. Radiology, Dermatology, Pathology... many specialties that have regular scheduled work hours.
- Money: less you work, the less you make. I know lots of people who complain about their work hours but will not make changes to decrease that because it would result in less money. Not always a possible tradeoff but rare for someone to even make an effort in that direction. I generally worked <40 hr/week (plus call), 4 days/week and took 8+ weeks of vacation/year (including 4 weeks during the summer when kids were out of school). This was possible because we had 3 people in a 2 person practice. It meant 2/3 of the money but that was enough for us to live on comfortably and pay off a $200K student loan. We did not live extravagantly.
- Practice setting: I worked in a small group practice with other women who believed in work life balance. I also had complete control over my office schedule. If one is in a non-supportive group practice or a large physician-hospital organization, that will be difficult/impossible. There are flexible practices out there if you're willing to make the tradeoffs in terms of money and geography.
- Spouse/partner support: DH was largely a stay at home dad (not much of a house husband) and we had nannies at times in addition for our 2 kids. I very much appreciated that I did not have to worry about what to do if a kid was sick or rush to pick up at daycare etc. 2 physician marriages can be quite difficult and many women MDs in such end up working part time etc.
- Geography: We live in a smallish town in a mellow part of the country where my office was 10 minutes and 2 stoplights from the kids school. It was easy to pop out, attend the Christmas program or parent-teacher conference, and pop back into the office.
If a person wants to be in a high intensity practice and/or make lots of money, yeah, forget about work-life balance. Otherwise, there are options, esp with geographic flexibility.
Having said that, I do not recommend going into medicine unless you really want to be in medicine. It was a fallback career for me and it has worked out well but I think I got lucky.
The female physicians I know well have a much better work life balance – at least after their residencies – than, say, big-firm lawyers or corporate executives.
So many physicians these days don’t have their own practices but are hired by a medical group and have more predictable hours. Yes, they may end up having to work on holidays but so do much-lower-paid nurses and x-ray techs and the like.
The female doctors I know that seem to have manageable lives include:
– ER doctor working for Kaiser (some holiday and late night shifts but predictable schedule)
– Radiologist
– Pathologist
– Cosmetic dermatologist
— Primary care physician working for medical group
– Orthopedic surgeon – honestly don’t know how this works but my neighbor is an orthopedic surgeon and she seemed to be around for her kids more than the lawyers in the neighborhood
– Some kind of pulmonologist that does only one kind of procedure during regular office hours. Not sure of the details, but the person I know who does this keeps very regular hours.
These are just the people I know. I’m sure there are many other specialties that have comparatively regular hours.
On the other hand, specialties where (1) the doctors have strong, one-on-one patient relationships; and (2) the time that the patient will need treatment is unpredictable – like OB/ GYNs or psychiatrists treating patients with serious mental illnesses – will likely have the most unpredictible hours, and thus the most difficult quality of life.
As an ob-gyn in solo practice, H is pretty much a dinosaur! Some ob-gyns are hospitalists - they have regular shifts at the hospital and deliver whoever is in labor - but that wasn’t for H. The whole point for him is building relationships and then getting to share in a joyous moment with his patients.
His father was also an OB, though (they were in practice together for some time) so he knew what he was getting into. They have families where my FIL delivered the mother and now H is delivering that lady’s baby. He’s even at the point where he is delivering the daughters of some of the women he delivered at the beginning of his practice! It’s a real thrill for him.
As for a SAH spouse and/or nanny - yes, absolutely necessary. We had a live-in nanny from the get-go, as my career sometimes required late hours or travel. And H was simply “unreliable” to be home or at a daycare at a certain time.
Possibly, but the less hours they work mean less access to medical care for the public.
When I wish to make an appt with a dermatologist, my wait time is 3 months ! What should I do with a large facial cystic pustule meantime?
My MD husband is 65+ years old and he still works 3 days a week so he is available to his patients who consistently ask for him even though he is in a large multi-specialty group. He’s been at his practice for 38+ years and we don’t need the money.
He is an old fashioned doctor who gives his patients his complete attention while they are in the exam room and not wrap himself around a computer so he can complete his electronic medical records at the same time. He does it afterwards so this adds hours to his day after his last patient is seen.
H is a surgeon (has a sub-specialty) employed by a hospital. He has 2 partners, they are looking for at least one more. He is on call about 10 nights a month (from home). Some nights are quiet, some nights he is in at 1 am operating. He has some days where he goes in late or comes home early, but he also has days where he goes in at 530am and gets home at 10pm.
He tries to make it to all of the kids’ activities and events, but it doesn’t always work out. Luckily we live close enough to his job that he can get home or to the school even for a little while and then go back to work.
One thing that has helped a lot (and was only possible with a lot of thriftiness in the early years and a nice salary now) is that I have been able to stay at home. We get to spend a lot more time together than we would if I also worked outside the home.
Only one of our 3 sons has expressed an interest in being a doctor, and my H tells him to think long and hard about being a surgeon. The length of training, and the long hours can be very difficult both on the doctor and his family. His surgery residency had a rep for a super high divorce rate—there was even a guy who got divorced twice. This was back in the days before the hours got limited, of course.
I am a female medical student who went into the profession knowing that I am risking my personal life being a flop. The thing is, the risk is there anyway, and if I wake up in 40 years having neither, I will regret not giving this a go. My father wanted me to be a nurse, but I think it’s a personal decision that I ultimately have to live with for many years, so he came around. Women physicians came to speak to us students and they did express having difficulties finding appropriate childcare, etc. Medicine socializes us to take responsibility for “our” patients, so if the patient is sick after hours or things go south at the end of the work day, the patient is still under our care, so we may have to either resolve it/be consulted/be ready to respond/etc. As mentioned above, a specialty like Emergency Medicine does not have this concept, but this is a reality of the profession for many, and quite fairly, I think.
I have three female friends who are doctors. Two are OB/Gyn’s and one is a pediatrician.
Two are married to other doctors, one is divorced. They all make serious dough, they all have kids, and they all seem to be enjoying their lives. They’re all in their late 40’s.
The downsides for them that I’ve observed is that the women at the bus stop used to ask them about gross female problems while we were waiting to pick up kids, and the one who is married to an ER physician is kind of a ditz when it comes to being able to take care of her kids, pets, or car. We were forever bringing her dogs back to her house because she’d just let them out to wander the neighborhood (they were toy breeds), and once she locked her keys in her car and asked my husband if he knew how to open it because “I thought you were a mechanic”. (He’s got a master’s degree in computer science). It’s like all her smarts were concentrated in the field of medicine.
She also had a string of full-time nannies, and was forever looking for one. The work life balance in that family was not optimal, from my point of view, but they seemed to be fine with it.
The other two didn’t have nannies-the divorced one has one kid who is 50-50 at the dad’s until leaving for college, and the other one has two littler ones (the pediatrician) who runs a practice where she swaps time with the other doc.
My guess is this is totally depending on whether this is the type of work the person wants to do. If somebody is chasing just the “prestige” of being a physician, and the income, I would bet that many of those people end up very unhappy. And I do think that is why many pursue medicine . . because they see it as a prestigious and lucrative occupation regardless of the investment in time, money and effort. But I have to assume some become doctors because that is their life’s calling, and that is a totally different situation.
This is not true anymore.
Not when you have fresh CS graduates receiving $180K to start as well as receiving stock options. Or people in finance, who can make similar amounts without going through postgrad schooling and training and don’t have the amount of debt doctors have. I am talking about the tiny percentage of people who can have the grades to attend med school.
There are other jobs that can be compensate well.
Thank goodness for the physicians that are responding in Orlando.
I think it is telling that none of my in-laws’ five children went into any type of health-related field. My FIL was an ob/gyn and my MIL was a psychiatrist. They met in medical school in the late 1940s.
I think that is probably not that unusual @MaineLonghorn As I said earlier, my kids’s maternal great grandfather was a physician , my maternal grandmother was a nurse, in the 1920’s. The great grandfather had only 2 girls, one ended up with a PhD , the other an MS in biology. Neither went into medicine but were still interested in science. But, I imagine there are still doctors and dentists that are having kids that gravitate to those fields, but maybe not many? Can only think of one kid of a current physician or dentist I know of who has a kid that has moved in a similar direction .
We do have a close friend who is a dentist, whose son has recently started dental school in his 30s, after being a ski bum for years.
I just ran into my doctor, a man in his 60s who’s also a professor of medicine. He told me in no uncertain terms that he still believes his field is worth pursuing for the passionate person. He also said he welcomes the way young doctors, both men and women, are starting to challenge “the system” in their demands for a better life/work balance.
So here’s to you, young MDs, or MDs-to-be. Go for it. And change the world while you’re at it. We’ll all be the better for it.