What's it like Being a Doctor? Doctor Life!

DOCTOR LIFE is very variable as the field is divided into specialties as dissimilar as the eye is from the toe. The environment practiced in also is highly variable e.g. Military versus commercial versus public. Some doctors practice from home, others from small clinics, others in huge hospitals, and some work in research or administration and never see a patient.

For family physicians, hours of work are similar to regular offices with some taking night calls or day house calls from their patients. Clinics also run regular hours but some offer extended hours by having their doctors work a rotating shift. In a hospital, care must be provided around the clock. This is done by an on-call system: every four days work a regular work day, through the night, and then through the next day again with two or three hours sleep, then resuming work the next morning for a half to full day and regular working hours the next two days and repeat. This of course is very taxing on a doctor and can result in social and home issues.

For all doctors, after the 'trauma' of medical school, a period of internship is required. This a time of supervised clinical training with a steep learning curve. Many clinical skills are developed for cases of future emergency, some of which a doctor may never use again but should know in case disasters or freak accidents etc Typically the degree of hands-on experience a doctor is involved in decreases with time and more time is spent on direction of younger doctors. A doctor becomes more valuable with age as his or her body of experience and therefore clinical judgment grows.

As many more physicians are needed in communities than are trained, doctors seldom experience the turbulence of market layoffs and unemployment.

Graduation from medical school does not guarantee lifetime practice. To protect the public, medical cases with unusual or unexpectedly poor outcomes are reviewed by medical boards. If the attending physician is repeatedly found erring s/he is deemed unfit to practice and their license is revoked. For a few of the oldest physicians left today, there were no CAT scans, MRI, computers and many common drugs around when they graduated. So part of being a doctor is keeping up with changes in the field.

The day to day experience of a doctor is typically spent hurriedly, with a high degree of concentration and rapid decision making based on their lifetime of experience.

Why Doctors Write Badly

 

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