@NewUser25,
Your daughter is definitely wise beyond her years and it’s really great that she’s discussing these aspects with you. I’m happy to answer. So yes, she probably realizes that medical school does involve quite a few hours of sustained studying during the basic science years, but there are also clinical rotations you do during the third year of medical school that can involve very long hours (which is our Year 5 in the program - i.e. General Surgery, OB-Gyn, sometimes IM, etc., we do have select rotations during Year 4 as well – Family Medicine, Year 4 Internal Medicine). although there are other rotations where this is not the case (i.e. Psychiatry). As she mentions, residency is about 80+ hours per week (it’s not like a clock in-clock out punching a time card type of system, it’s more monthly self-reported data by the resident which as you can imagine can lend itself to being fudged): http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/2009/11/ccas1-0911.html, although residency training is a finite amount of time. The 80 hour work week for residency training actually came about because of work-hour restrictions that came about first starting in 2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_resident_work_hours. All this I realize she understands, but as you well know, sometimes knowing how something is in theory and actually experiencing it can be very different in terms of understanding the gravity of the situation.
So I think once you’re a full-fledged attending (whether right after residency or after a subspecialty fellowship), workload, and thus work-life balance, can vary a lot depending on the:[ul]
[]practice type (hospital, group practice, solo practice)
[]specialty & subspecialty (examples - Neurosurgery vs. Derm; Cardiology vs. Allergy/Immunology; Emergency Medicine - which tends to be shift work, they do x number of shifts a month)
[li]the area you’re working in (city vs. rural) and how desperate they need that particular physician in that particular area (that’s why rural areas tend to have much higher salaries vs. major cities since they have great difficulty getting practitioners, although this also affected by your payor mix, i.e. # of those with private insurance, # of Medicare/Medicaid/Obamacare Exchange plans, etc.).[/ul][/li]Different specialties and subspecialties alone, just naturally have different lifestyles due to the particular problems they treat and the chances of having an emergency in that field (that’s why call was created, although this is usually on a rotating schedule – hospitals tend to have some type of call schedule in a department where you have to be at the hospital although this can vary, group practice tends to split it among the group if call is necessary in their specialty - which is usually taken as home call and then if something comes in, you go to the particular hospital where you have hospital privileges). For example, Cardiology, is not likely to have a great lifestyle overall once you’re an attending (subspecializing after IM or Peds), vs. say PM&R (Physical Medicine and Rehab).
Part-time work is probably more available in Pediatrics, in general, than many other specialties, just because a higher percentage of practitioners in that field are women and find being able to work part-time important - i.e. especially after giving birth, etc. So when they’re looking for jobs, and if you don’t offer the possibility of working part-time, pediatricians will just go to someone else who does. IM also does offer part-time work as well - although probably more in areas like outpatient General medicine or Allergy/Immunology, which is outpatient by nature. For example, you usually can’t be a part-time cardiologist – it just won’t work, because people get heart attacks that can happen any time, you can’t be a part-time neurosurgeon (as far as I know).
In terms of availability of part-time work, this can also vary a lot by practice type and specialty. A hospital is probably not likely to hire someone who wants to work part-time, vs. say a private practice that has had difficulty in getting someone for a while or for whom making availability of a part-time option a priority. You can read about the lifestyle of Pediatric Gastroenterology here: http://www.pedsubs.org/subdes/Gastroenterology.cfm, which reading it seems pretty accurate based on what I’ve seen. Realize that many times in private practice, doctors might work longer just because you’re the one bringing in the money to pay the bills and keep your lights on in the private practice, unlike if you work for a hospital or an academic medical center which already has a huge infrastructure in place, and where you’re usually on salary and have to see x number of patients per year, blah blah which is all stated in your contract, but on the flip side is that the hospital, as your employer, calls the shots on many aspects.
In that Youtube video, I posted above on PA vs. MD, I believe they do discuss about training length, lifestyle, and work-life balance. For example, a PA doesn’t do a residency, but can flip between specialties easier, unlike a physician who can’t do that because you’d have to redo a residency in that field before practicing it. I will say this, and this is only my opinion, but I feel like if you come into medical school initially with the major concern about lifestyle, medicine will be much much harder for you, just because there is a LOT of delayed gratification that you will have to be able to put up with, before you finally get to enjoy that particular lifestyle (not even taking into account that certain residencies and subspecialty fellowships can be very competitive to get due to the inherent lifestyle). Many older attendings are very disconnected when it comes to lifestyle concerns, but they also were born in a different generation, when medicine was much different than it is now in terms of what they value: http://www.amanet.org/training/articles/Leading-the-Four-Generations-at-Work.aspx.
I think it’s one of the major issues that will affect medicine more and more, and affect our profession greatly, when students these days are much more willing to scope out other choices and not just automatically jump on the physician bandwagon, just because they want a career in healthcare (i.e. see the PA and NP professions - in which the delay of gratification to finally practice tends to be smaller & overall responsibilities tend to be less, compared to physicians and thus more lifestyle conducive, not to mention probably less student debt although I haven’t calculated out the numbers exactly, the way the Atlantic article did that I posted above). And then there are professions like Dentistry (with its subspecialties) or Optometry in which a controlled lifestyle is already built into the cake, and thus much more well accepted by those in the profession, because of the particular work that they do. I hope that makes sense and that I answered your questions.