<p>There are no "safe" careers. There is no gain in life without risk.</p>
<p>It's all a question of, what phase of the process do you take the risk? With medicine, it's in the admissions and med school. There's tremendous competition to get in, even among top students in top schools, and it makes college admissions look relaxed. Same with law school. And in school, many med/law students burn out from the titanic amounts of work they have to do. That, too, is risk. </p>
<p>A career "in business" (which can mean a variety of things) is more flexible, and generally requires less explicit training to start off with. The skills you pick up are more transferable, since they tend to relate to (A) understanding the way companies work, (B) an ability to sell, (C) vision to create and grow an organization, and (D) all kinds of people skills. Whether you are an entrepreneur, a financial analyst, a management consultant, a sales rep somewhere, or even a marketing wonk, you will always have a skill set that will get you a job if the one you have doesn't work out. The risk in a business career tends to be farther down the line, and has more to do with whether you can advance and grow and become more productive or useful (or whether your career stagnates because you're just not very good).</p>
<p>To stretch an analogy, getting a law or med degree gives you a fish. A very big, tasty fish, which can last you a lifetime. But developing your business skills teaches you how to fish, ultimately making you more self-reliant.</p>
<p>And then there is the issue of potential upside. Doctors and lawyers make good money but their earnings are, essentially, capped by the limits of an hourly billing rate (doctors may not get paid by the hour but their services are billed to health insurance companies at fixed prices). Their skills, while highly valued, are mostly interchangeable with those of other people of similar quality. Top businessmen, on the other hand, have essentially no ceiling to their income because it all is a factor of how much value their companies can add to humanity. Bill Gates can make his own space shuttle because his software has made the economy more productive and efficient. Andrew Carnegie has public institutions named after him because he knew how to run a steel plant like you wouldn't believe. They didn't bill by the hour. </p>
<p>You can't put a salary range on what a "business career" makes, because many people that describes are (essentially) not employees, they are employers. They don't have an employee mentality of "how much salary do I get and can I skip out of work at 4:30", they have an employer mentality of "what will it take to make this company a better place? What can I do to this product to make this world a better place?". 97% of this world are employees, and they work for the 3% of the world who own or run businesses. Somewhere in your parents' hospitals are executives who are thinking about whether your parents' salaries are really necessary and what can be done about rising costs. What side of that decision is it better to be on?</p>
<p>There are many noble and fulfilling careers out there. Don't let your parents tell you that one thing is more risky or has less upside. Everything is risky, and the upside in everything is determined by how much you love it and how hard that love makes you work.</p>