Career and Life Planning Guidebook for Medical Residents

C H A P T E R A U T H O R S R E A D : Introduction: I’d much rather be a good physician than a rich one, but I don’t see any reason why a doctor can’t be both. Your patients, family, and friends all assume you’re rich, so you might as well be rich. Medicine is a difficult career. It requires intelligence, perseverance, attention to detail, and a lot of hard work, and that’s just to get into medical school. Getting through the long pipeline of medical training requires even more of these attributes, many nights of lost sleep, and a decade of lost earnings. Even once you’re out of training, you have to deal with a number of potential stressors: fear of liability, the potential for more sleepless nights, ever-evolving government regulations, and the constant emotional drain of managing serious, chronic illnesses, often constraining social determinants of health, and death. Although societal norms can make one feel uncomfortable for earning an income often thought of as “high”, the truth is that the vast majority of people agree that physicians should be highly paid for their work. Incomes overall may be trending down, but physicians often are earning more than the average American household. Whether a doctor becomes wealthy with that potentially higher income, however, is entirely up to them. “If you do wish to splurge a little, to loosen up, do it after there is $1 million in the bank and after the mortgage has been paid off.” — Robert Doroghazi, MD, FACC SECTION III: T MINUS ONE YEAR CAREER AND LIFE PLANNING GUIDEBOOK FOR MEDICAL RESIDENTS 350