<p>OK-- I have some questions about the path to the medical profession.</p>
<li><p>How does medical school compare to being a premed in college in terms of: amount of work, amount of free time, difficulty, and stress?</p></li>
<li><p>How many hours a day does a resident work?</p></li>
<li><p>Do residents work normal work hours, i.e. 9 am - 5 pm?</p></li>
<li><p>What exactly do residents do? Do they simply follow the doctor around while he does his work?</p></li>
<li><p>Do surgeons have normal work hours, i.e. 9 am - 5 pm? Do they have to be constantly on-call?</p></li>
<li><p>A lot of people mention “personal sacrifice” as part of the medical profession, can anybody give me some insight into what this might include, besides the long and difficult education?</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Medical school and residency are a lot of work. Once you finish training, you can , more or less, pick your hours. Of course, you need to find a job that permits this.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>For most people more work, less free time, much less difficult intellectually, but more difficult in volume of material to memorize. Higher stress overall, but different. In college you are worrying about getting into medical school. In med school you are worried about absorbing all this information, and wondering whether missing something will end up hurting a patient (unlikely but med students worry about this).</p></li>
<li><p>Current rules limit resident hours to 80 hours per week for most fields, 100 hours per week for surgery. These rules are often violated.</p></li>
<li><p>Generally no. Sometimes you may get a very light rotation, perhaps in a slow outpatient clinic, but as the answer to 2 shows, 9-5 would be rare.</p></li>
<li><p>Residents gradually transition from students to independent physicians. So they practice under supervision. The level of supervision decreases as the resident progresses through training.</p></li>
<li><p>Rarely. They are not constantly on call, but many surgeons work long hours. The field does not appeal to people who want regular hours.</p></li>
<li><p>When you are taking care of patients, their welfare comes first. So the fact that you want to go home, to your kids soccer game, to dinner, etc really do not matter. You have to take care of your patients no matter what. Depending on your field, this can completely dominate your life. Note, people choose these fields with their eyes open, and most would not have it any other way.</p></li>
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<p>Basically you could liken it to giving up your life for baically volunteering. Sure you do get paid quite well depending on what you do but the emotional and physical toll on the body is intense. I know a retired ct surgeon and he was my inspiration. He always tells me stories of having to leave dinner parties or just never being at home with his family. Also if you finish a surgery at 2 am and you go home and something happens your coming back to the hospital to fix it. Its your job to do anything in your power to make it happen. Thats why it is so hard for many doctors to marry because people outside of the profession can't understand the commitment. In residency you work the long hours for minimum wage basically. And try explaining that to someone who knows nothing about the dedicaiton and they will laugh.</p>
<p>Thanks afan and bigndude for your replies! I really appreciate your advice as I am right now trying to decide whether or not I want to enter the medical profession.</p>
<p>I think that I would like to work in the operating room, but I don't want to be living in the fast lane for half my life (i.e. chronic sleep deprivation, stress, depression). So are there ever any breaks for surgeons?</p>
<p>Do they need to work weekends as well?</p>
<p>Do they get vacations?</p>
<p>Do they have to worry about job security, lay offs, pay etc?</p>
<p>Once you are well established after about 10 years of so of work you can call your own vacations and such. Most of a time a surgeon is on call so you get weekends off, maybe once a month at most. Job security is pretty good unless you make a mistake and is basically the end of your career if its a big enough mistake.</p>
<p>It may not be quite that bad. How often you are on call depends on your practice arrangements. If you have lots of surgeons with whom you share call, you may be on call one in three weeks, or even less. Of course, this means you are covering all the work for 3 or more people. So you would essentially live in the hospital while on call. Same for vacations. Yes, you get them, but the amount of time depends on the arrangements you make with fellow surgeons. </p>
<p>Call and vacations also depend on the kind of surgery you do. Some areas- like general surgery and cardiac surgery- generate lots of emergency work. Others-like plastic surgery- are primarily elective procedures, so call is much lighter.</p>
<p>You really do not need to worry about this now. People decide on specialties after a couple of years of medical school, sometimes later. Before that no one knows enough about medicine to have an opinion as to what they like to do. Right now, learn more about medicine, shadow some physicians, volunteer at a hospital or clinic, and get an idea of whether the overall work appeals to you.</p>
<p>Not all doctors work like the surgeons bigndude describes. In general, surgery is the most demanding of your time. No one is forced to go into surgery. Those who choose this field love the feeling that the patient's care revolves around them. They may complain about their hours, but few surgeons would have it any other way.</p>
<p>Surgeons of all types work long hours at first. Especially plastic surgeons who need to be established to bring in the business. The only type of docs I can think of who work normal hours that I know are doctors that are extremely specialized in nonsurgical areas such as Dermatology (like the doc said), Opthamology, and things of that nature. Pediatricians, Gen Prac's all work long long hours even though it may not seem so by their office hours. You have to remember that you have to look over patients charts, their labs, and deal with insurance companies, and still be learning new things about medicine the whole time. Its not like at 5pm you pack up and go home, you stick around the office until maybe 9 or 10 or even later to get everything done. The only doctors that I know, and I know quite a few, that can set their own hours and vacations are those who have been practicing for over 20 years.</p>