Where's the trap ?

>be a doctor
>specialize in something like radiology
>make 500k a year
>respected by everyone
>save lives
>have your own private business with no one to take orders from


It seems to good to be true. Where's the downside to all this ? I know med school is hell but I don't mind an academic life for a few years and have great grades.

you offset your earning power by a good 6-10 years or so (including having to pay back 200-300k in loans).
high demand for those cushy high paying positions
cutthroat environment of medical school
scheduling your life around your work instead of vice-versa
having essentially a pretty monotonous job, with little actual science involved
having to interact with normies

The downside is that nothing you listed is entirely true, most of it is far more complex and laden with catches than you think, and some is outright not a thing.

The first two issues:
>specialize in radiology
>have a private practice
No. Not unless you're independently wealthy, and in a very specific sort of area. You need referrals for patients insurance to cover it (which means being in some network, with many smaller primary care facilities around. Hospitals generally have their own radiology), you need to actually buy and maintain the equipment, you need to pay staff to do all the paperwork, arguing with insurance companies, interacting with patients, etc. Yet another expense. Many private practices find it financially infeasible for that reason alone, you can't do it all yourself, and staff is expensive.

>save lives
That's not a thing with radiology. You're usually just the one telling them how they're fucked up or unremarkable.

>make 500k a year
Nah. Not if you're on salary, and not if you practice privately. And all the loans. Again, leading back to being independently wealthy. At which point, who cares about your salary? You don't need it. You might not be just playing and filling your time, but you certainly don't need it. Do you know the cost of a minimal CT scanner alone?

By the jimminy geez user, I don't know where people get this stuff. It's mechanically impossible, a thing of dreams, illusion, and fantasy.

>One of the highest suicide rates when broken down by profession (twice as likely to kill yourself when compared to the general population)
>High dependence on political lobbying, which means that technically your profession has no inherent value to it. Doctors keep high wages because of artificial market control and political lobbying, should anything go wrong you will end up earning as much as a Cuban doctor: 20 bucks a month.
>You attract gold diggers and other despicable people who want to use you. Very few professions have this quality, even "businessman" lacks it because a businessman could just be some guy about to declare bankruptcy, but everyone knows that (at least for now) doctors are always rich so gold diggers rush to be with you then cheat on you/kill you and then collect child support/life insurance.
>Stupid people have your number and can call you all the time.
>You have pharmaceutic companies on your back pressuring to illegally promote their new drugs despite their lack of research. If you decline to cooperate with their market plan then they will literally use their industry connections to destroy your career, so you are forced to be a bad person to be a doctor.
>malpractice lawsuits

You will have to deal with sick people everyday, which is mostly annoying and disgusting, and also quite risky. You can always infect yourself with what ever nasty shit your patients have.

A good chunk of your salary, up to $200k+ if you're new, his to malpractice insurance.

Radiology machine send data to third world countries to analyst or deep learning automatization radiology in next 10 years

Do you have any idea what radiologists do?

>private practice
You join am established group, nitwit. You put your time in and make partner after a while assuming your contract isn't shit. Hospitals contract with groups. Groups cover multiple hospitals.

>save lives
Um, you save people's lives all the time. Guy comes in with stroke, CT his head, you read it, clinicians treat, you help saved the life.

OP, radiology is a great specialty. I'm a third year med student looking to go into it. I've done research with the department at my school and have had some exposure to it, and will be doing a rotation in it soon.

Advantages
>don't have to follow complicated annoying patients with psych and social issues. Procedures that you do have a beginning and an end. End of procedure=bye bye patient.
>make good money but more like 350k. The days of 500k+ are over.
>you are the guy who makes the diagnosis quite often. Everyone gets scanned nowadays
>cool technology
>complex field that is ever changing. Threat by midlevels is less intense
>cool fellowships you can do after to sub-specialize e.g. neuroradiology
>ability to do lots of procedures if that is what you're interested in

Disadvantages
>you sit in a dark room and read images all day long
>little patient interaction, if that's your thing
>you don't move around a lot

>You join am established group, nitwit.
I don't really understand what you're trying to say here. It's like you don't understand what I wrote.

>Guy comes in with stroke, CT his head, you read it
Depending, you may or may not be the one doing the imaging, and you may or may not be the one reading it. In a group, often, you are not both.

>you help saved the life.
From a broad and looser perspective. You can consider yourself part of a grander chain, but in your everyday, you really just figured out what was fucked. Other people fixed it. You are always only a proxy to determine what's fucked.

The trap is as follows - It isn't Mathematics or Physics and therefore isn't as academically rewarding or as fun to do. That is the trap.

my uncle owns his own practice. He makes millions each year.

question for you, how did he start his own practice, how did he pay for the overhead?

You got a point, if I do that I probably won't have a real job before I'm 25, but I live with my parents so I don't have to worry about rent/food for a while. And I live in Canada, so student loans aren't a big problem. The government pays most of it for native students, and it only costs you like 3000$ for a year of university.

>500k a year
>work 18 hrs a day
kinda shit

>where's the trap
Your life will be miserable.

Thanks for the answer. I'm still far away from choosing a precise career path, but radiology is the specialisation that attracts me the most.

>make good money but more like 350k. The days of 500k+ are over.

The average salary for a radiologist where I live is 500k (best paid job in the province), but 50% of that goes to taxes. Still leaves more than I'll ever need to live well.

I'd love to be able to do research and work outside of the daily routine. What kind of research did you do ? Do you work on technological subjects or is it only on anatomy and biological subjects ?

>you saving lives
Kek
No it's the surgical oncologist reading your brain scan that cut the tumour out that "saved" his life, you just made it easier and safer to find out where the tumour is, otherwise he could always resort to an exploratory surgery if there isn't a radiologist around and the patient needs the surgery now.

>Canadian med student
>Expects to practice in the US.

you're joking right?

My mother and step dad are both physicians. They are both partners and make a lot of money, however, as others have said:
>>Not making money until you're ~30
>>Hundreds of thousands of loans
>>Getting into med school nowadays is extremely difficult due to how many people are trying to get in (Literally 4,000 premeds at my alma mater alone every year.)
>>Med school itself is very difficult
>>Could be different for other physicians, but my parents work stupidly long hours, every day of the work

My mom is on call almost every weekend, including Sundays, and even when she isn't, if there is a life threatening emergency she still gets called in. Sure the pay is great, I will never make as much money as she does and she can afford whatever she wants, but do I want to work hours like that?

shit how much are they/you going to be worth? that's crazy. also what do you do?

I think once they become partner at their new firms, they'll make a combined income of ~1 million a year. I'm a chemistry graduate student.

The biggest trap that hasn't been said is simply how competitive radiology resident positions are to get. Tons of people go after that cushy position and remember this is you competing against other medical students not random jack offs in college. Dermatology is also another cushy and therefore highly competitive position. Just make sure to crush your Step 1 is what I'm saying.

It's more life your rad-tech diagnoses and you verify.
It's basically like chemistry where the actual "Chemist IV" sits in an office all day and lab techs do all the lab work.

>Where's the downside to all this ?

It's a fantastic profession, but malpractice lawsuits could become the biggest troll driving you crazy if you get unlucky.

why the fuck do you need to know biology or even anything to be a radiologist?

Don't you just need to look at a picture and just know what the fuck is going on?

What about anaesthesiology-reanimatology? is this worth my efforts and time?

Basically this. A friend of my Dad is an orthopedic surgeon and he makes serious money, but he works VERY long hours.

except lab techs are retarded monkeys who don't understand or develop shit, and just follow procedures which were developed by a real scientist

I know, because i'm a lab tech lmao

>thinks his freebie canadianese med """school""" paper is worth jack fucking shit outside of his third world country
you will literally never practice outside of canada
you know that "free" healthcare everybody raves about in canada? that will be you, making fuckall and helping chinese people with sore throats all day
>canadian doctor making 500k a year
maybe if they have a trust fund

How's the market for a radiologist assistant, lab tech, or whatever it's called? The associate's degree? My sister's studying that.

This.

Since there is is no physics or math, medicine is very easy and only brainlets choose it.

>have your own private business with no one to take orders from
I'm pretty sure you have to take orders or you lose your license. Just because you have a business doesn't mean you can do whatever the fuck you want.

Doctors are Brainlets and only get paid so much because of government regulations on medicine and health care.
They can all be easily replaced by software.

Yep. Same can be said for almost all medicine.
All you need to do is just remember and have a half decent iq.
With somethings, such as surgery, it's just a learned skill.
Why do you need a degree in anything for it? Oh wait Government regulations so that the pay is inflated.

>be a doctor
>also manage a business
>also stave off alcoholism and have a family

Good luck, champ.

Working hours.
Stress.

>le slave away doing boring doctor stuff

how fucking retarded are you lmao the top canadian med schools are extremely competitive with comparable american schools, and luckily there is this thing called board cert that you can write allowing you to practice int he states, you sound fucking buthurt that canada is essentially superior to america in every metric that isnt obesity, and war crimes

are YOU joking? losing doctors to the states because of the vastly superior compensation is a HUGE problem in canada we call it the brain drain and it is prevalent in nearly all of academia, read a book

Not the guy you replied to but you're only half right. Yes, you have to take all 3 USMLE's but even then you still have to get accepted into a residency program. You'll be applying as an IMG which means you'll be lucky to do family med in the boonies.

Why are Canadian Med schools considered as IMG? Don't they follow the same system and study the exact same shit. Feels complete bullshit to me. Can understand if they were with Caribbean Med schools.

They are considered IMG because they are not located in America

Lol you can make the same argument for caribbean students - they 'study the exact same shit' too.But if you're not a US med student, you're shit out of luck. Not to mention, you need to actually do -well- on the board exams which is no guarantee. There's lots of factors to consider. I only say this because I've worked with IMG's in the past and you can potentially spend thousands of dollars and man hours studying for the Steps and applying for residency and come up empty handed.

I'm an MBBS babby. So I'm not quite familiar with your system. Is the difference that the US Med school nurtures the student to take STEP and USMLE as compared to IMGs?

Because Canadians think they're on equal planes but aren't nobody likes faggy Canada degrees

Hard to say. Some say their USMD/DO program prepares their students for boards while others argue that they passed in spite of their curriculum, not because of it. In my experience, I was top quartile of my USMD class and scored >1 SD on Step 1 so I'd say there's some correlation between the two.

Meth fags and physicists will make fun of your mathematical ineptitude on the internet.

why would the government of every country conspire to higher the pay of doctors?

You will never sleep again.

You will work all day, every day until you hit 85. They'll have to pry your dead body from the office.

Private life? Ha! People will call. Stupid people will call. Forever.

Stress, hearth disease, depression, those will accompany you to your ironicaly late grave.

Your sense of humor will become a cynical, morbid creature.

You will learn the atrocities your "colleagues" call proper medical practice.

The first 30 years of your life you won't earn money

The next 10 years of your life you'll be little more than a slave. Unless you are a resident. The. You will be less than a slave.

You will learn to love it.

*then

Because every where there are doctors there are people that want to be paid more. It's also a natural consequence of more regulations and laws as time goes on.

>hard as fuck subject to study that can burn you out and leave you psychologically crippled for the rest of your life
>huge debt
>you need to work in a hospital for several years before you can specialise in any field
>working in a hospital means awful working hours, annoying patients, risk of infections and relatively little pay
>once you specialised you are probably 40+
>you fuck up one patient and you get a million dollar lawsuit and can lose your prohibition

>implying you won't win the prosecution case
All you need is a good set of morals and you're good to go. It's really easy to sway the case in your direction if you've never had a complain in years and some retard decides to come in with his/her accusations and mock you.

Unless you're a perverted Ob/Gyn or a pedophilliac Pediatrist, you should be fine.

The biggest downside is that medicine becomes your life. Your friends are all medics, your colleagues are medics, the people you are medics or patients, you'll probably marry a medic. It is all-encompassing and will eat every minute you have. Your social life is two days a month, if you're lucky - high intensity, low frequency.

It's as much a lifestyle as it is a career.

You literally don't know shit about medicine.

t. guy who has multiple radiologists in his family

>That shitty logic
So this... is the power... of mathematicians..

And yet he says nothing.

You have to spend about 30 years to get the job you initially wanted.

Worked with a private radiology practice on-and-off for a few summers during undergrad. In addition to the obvious downsides that seem to hold for anyone going into medicine (student loans, years of training, long hours/low pay of residency, etc.), downsides of private practice are running a practice and paying staff and what not despite decreasing compensation. Specifically, in radiology, one major difficulty is paying off the CT/MRI/X-ray machines, which are quite expensive. The practice that I worked for, back around the late-00s to early-10s, ended up closing shop a few years ago.

>scheduling your life around your work instead of vice-versa

I already do this as a nurse. And I bet a lot of other people do to.

> be radiologist

> replaced by computer 5 years out
> no other marketable skills
> huge student debt

Apart from all the pro's and con's that have been alredy listed for me there is one con that's standing above all.

It's just fucking boring and not mentally stimulating at all.