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Comment by segmondy | Hacker News Reader

A bit too late, but if I could do it all over again, I would have gone into health care. I have lot's of friend in the industry.

Ask them about their day, they just saved lives - heart surgery, brain surgery, trauma stabilization in ER, just saw a toddler through cancer treatment, and so on and so forth.

What did I do? Oh, I wrote code.

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I came the other way -- I quit medicine (completed Medical school then did not do residency) for programming. I very much enjoyed the material and rigor but the day-to-day work ultimately left me feeling extremely bored and depressed. What I found in the field was it was incredibly bureaucratic, inefficient, and quite frequently unprofessional feeling. Depending on the hospital, many patients were sick because they outright didn't take care of themselves. Surgery is much less precise than you'd imagine and depressingly impersonal. In the six week rotation I did in the pediatric ER, I saw extremely few cases where the treatment was actually urgent and made a difference (like I can count on one hand). I don't want to bash it too hard, because ultimately I just wasn't a good fit for it. It has its good parts and the social perception you get when you say "I'm a doctor" is real. But you are very much a cog and if you ever think you want to change (and you can, if you want) -- make sure you spend some real time shadowing the profession you think you'd go into.

I was interested in radiology after doing a contract development work for an X-Ray manufacturer. I thought "Hey, I'm young enough, lets check out the field and if its something that I really like, med school isnt completely out of the question", come to find out, the one slice of medicine that seemed appealing to me is among the top 5% of the most elite and selective practices to get into. Really disappointed me. Like, I get it, you have to be good enough to read films accurately so as not to kill anyone, but I disagree with the elitism. I mean, a bus driver also has hundreds of peoples' lives in his hands each day.

What's going on there has a lot to do with lifestyle. Some of the most challenging specialties (cardiovascular, neurosurgery) are understandably selective. But others (Radiology, Dermatology) have more to do with people wanting a good lifestyle. Those specialties which may already have short hours, then strategically limit the amount of Doctors they let in to keep the supply low and the salaries high. Thus you get highly competitive specialties because of short hours and high pay. So if you've ever needed a Dermatologist, but struggled to get an appointment less than 6 months away... its not because nobody wants to do derm. Its because they don't let many doctors do it. Its sad.

That is sad. So now the patient's $2000 MRI bill is at least partly due to Comcast-like monopolistic practices with both the equipment owner and the rads reading the films. And the dr's are incentivized to create their lucrative cartel to payback their $300k student-loans, which only cost that much because of...a cartel in medical schools (or at least certain residency specialties). I guess I wont feel too badly when Watson takes away all the rads'/ GP jobs (edit: GP's are good people, underpaid and overworked, I think it will be good when Watson liberates them to pursue more rewarding practices)

I see where you're coming from but I'd hang myself over the bureaucracy. Give me the code.

Not to mention, it's just as possible to positively effect the world as a developer as a doctor (easier without the red tape, actually.)

Hah! I don't work for a startup, I work for enterprise, we give meaning to bureaucracy too!

I'm not going to a startup, please don't suggest it. I've been there done that. Too broke for my liking, Enterprise got money, plenty of it! I like money and not worrying about it.

But could you do a surgery without squirming? I couldn't (though I suspect there's some getting used to needed)

They also saw that patient that barely made it, that kid with inoperable cancer or that person with lots of potential that attempted suicide

Its never too late. May not be easy, but its never too late.

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