The Falling-Down Professions - Medicine

Hoover  10 Jan, 2008  General

While once a top-of-the-top profession, medicine has been sliding down in-line with a regular old J.O.B. The mainstream media is beginning to see it, too. A recent article in the New York Times spells it out:

As of 2006, nearly 60 percent of doctors polled by the American College of Physician Executives said they had considered getting out of medicine because of low morale, and nearly 70 percent knew someone who already had.

This is hardly news for you guys that have been reading MSH for awhile. I do find it interesting that the mainsteam media — and the general public who consumes it — are now beginning to get the education that they deserve.

Physicians just don’t have what they used to have in terms of prestige. The money is still above-average, but the amount of social respect is dwindling.

In a culture that prizes risk and outsize reward — where professional heroes are college dropouts with billion-dollar Web sites — some doctors and lawyers feel they have slipped a notch in social status, drifting toward the safe-and-staid realm of dentists and accountants. It’s not just because the professions have changed, but also because the standards of what makes a prestigious career have changed.

This decline, Mr. Florida argued, is rooted in a broader shift in definitions of success, essentially, a realignment of the pillars. Especially among young people, professional status is now inextricably linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity, concepts alien to seemingly everyone but art students even a generation ago.

Patients are more savvy about their conditions, and news stories of physician FUBARs add fuel to the fire. The old-school, hardcore docs are finally retiring out of the profession and the younger kids that will be entering college and careers are reshaping the way society views the medical professional. I see a day in the near future where physicians will be reduced to technologists in the public eye, and that’s only the beginning.

Medicine just isn’t what it used to be. Will it ever recover to the olden days? I highly doubt it.

Check out the article, The Falling-Down Professions. Don’t say I didn’t tell ya so.

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8 Comments so far »

  1. Someonect said

    January 10 2008 @ 7:33 am

    funny… yesterday, i referred to this article as well. i think you are probably right. it was once considered a noble profession. today, not so much. it is hard to change the publics view on the physician. they still see the physician as making “a lot” of money. therefore, physicians don’t have “right” to complain about money.

    i always find it interesting when physicians complain about decreases in their reimbursements, people will say “well they make a lot of money anyway.” fact is, most physicians have to see more patients and procedures to approach the same income of 10-20 years ago. there is more paperwork and higher overhead, less respect and more liability. physicians have lost a lot of their autonomy because of insurance carriers dictating care and changes in hospital demands. it is sad. i need to stop before i talk myself out of going into medicine. oh i for got i am already here, oh well.

    i still love what i do, but i hate the business.

  2. anonymous said

    January 11 2008 @ 7:01 am

    ALL professions are falling in to this, Hoover. Medicine is the most notable with the furthest to fall, but so much is changing. The most basic cashier jobs are becoming less with self-checkouts, ATMS are replacing so much of our bank transactions, at quite a few fast food restaurants we are able to order ourselves and food comes from automated machines. Cars require less knowledge and more computer diagnostic skill on behalf of the mechanics. Teachers are leaving more to their aids and doing more paperwork. (When I was growing up, no teacher had an aid. Now every teacher has at least one if not two or three.)

    How much do they do to themselves? A few weeks ago i took my 18 year old in to the urgent care for birth control. Long story– she was stressed to ask me and finally asked on a Friday night at 5:30 when she was to leave on Sunday to go back to college and she didn’t want to go down with her air headed girlfriends.) We have great insurance that paid 100% for the exam plus birth control. The admitting woman stared at her and scuffle-ran back to another room and came back with two other admittance clerks telling her to go to public health for free. DD said she was leaving state and since there was no one else there, to please help her with the exam and birth control so she could get it from the pharmacy before they closed at 8. The doctor and his two sidekick nurses talked the whole time through the exam about how she could go to public health where it was free. She understood why I drove two hours to the next town for a huge family rather than have babies in the hospital that ran that UC. They were getting paid– why was a doctor trying to send her to what he told her was the nurses at public health? Every person who she encountered there told her to not stay and to just make an appointment at the public health with the nurse. They didn’t educate her about the pill or about concerns, only to go to public health where it was free. They should have been happy for her business and glad that she wanted a full fledged medical doctor. (We respect the degree!)

  3. bronx43 said

    January 11 2008 @ 5:27 pm

    The changes in other professions mentioned by the poster above me are due to the continuing advancement of technology. These are entirely different from what is arising in the medical profession. Physician satisfaction is not impeded by the increased use of automated blood analysis machines or digitized X-rays. Instead, we are sick and tired of the inflated costs of medical education and the prolonged hell of residency training. (to name a few)

  4. Roger, Esq. said

    January 12 2008 @ 10:27 am

    I don’t fully agree with the news article. You have to realize that it’s the NEW YORK Times talking. In New York there are tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people who are millionaires. That’s not even counting the billionaires.

    Brad Pitt who makes $25 million per movie just moved in down the street. The founder of Google works next door. The hedge funder who makes $100 million a year works a couple of floors up from you. Your neighbors are 20 year old trust-funders who sleep and shop all day and party all night. And look, 50 Cent just drove up to the club in his $350,000 Lamborghini.

    All of a sudden, being a 25 year old, know-nothing fresh out of law school who makes the going rate of $160k salary + $40k bonus, and lives in a 500 sq. ft. studio apartment, doesn’t seem like hot shit.

    But ll in all, things still need to be put into perspective. Being a doctor or lawyer who makes $200k+ at a relatively young age is still a big deal in many other big cities not named New York.

  5. hak said

    January 14 2008 @ 12:42 am

    While the medical profession may be on a downward slide, I also found the article to be rather sensationalistic. I’m no fresh-out-of-college med school aspirant, but one pursuing a new career after investing nearly 20 years in my first field as one of the “creative” types mentioned in the article…the one where everyone allegedly has freedom to make work take form around their lives. Same goes for the web moguls.

    It’s all work with a small percentage hitting the jackpot.

  6. Moe said

    April 13 2008 @ 10:06 am

    Please….finding one article that downplays the perceived legitimacy of physicians cannot simply validate your perspective on medicine “falling.” Yes, med school is ridiculously expensive (i just took my loans out) and its a long journey, but the money is actually great and the respect you get is excellent. When people hear you are in med school or a physician they look at you differently. You cannot generalize a few retards that you’ve met doing your rotations as a matter of fact. Prestige? Come on.

  7. OpenAWindow said

    June 17 2008 @ 9:06 pm

    What possesses a person to specialize in gastroenterology? I’m glad some people do, but how do they do it? To paraphrase George Carlin, the odor can “…knock a buzzard off a shit wagon.”

    Similar scatalogical theme: A buddy of mine’s an anesthesiologist. He says that you haven’t lived until you’ve needed to defecate during the middle of the surgery that you’re helping with. We’re talking about the kind of load where, in your home bathroom, you’d be grabbing the towel rack with both hands, and you’d have the bottom of one of your feet pressed-up against the wall.

  8. Ambrose Okpokpo said

    June 21 2008 @ 5:03 am

    If Medicine falls then people will fall as humans, also. Imagine a world with almost no doctors of medicine. You would have almost no lawsuites. You would miserable people with old the past sickness killing them. In this context, I have strong believe that medicine would never fall but the human health would deterirate before it would (I mean Medicine) fall. People who think they can run everything with money a the ones falling. One of this days, there money would no-longer heal them or give them a good health for taking Medicine forgranted. Medicine is still the best profession.

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