Am I a physician or am I not? That’s how Shakespeare might have put it. This question seems trivial yet, at least for physicians reading this blog, the answer might not be as straightforward as it seems at first.

For physicians having their own office or working in the hospital it’s pretty pretty pretty clear, as Larry David would have said. Working as a physician on a daily, clinical basis you are probably going to be treated as a physician and feel as a physician. If you have a dual degree in medicine and economics, such as an MBA, working for a pharmaceutical company, a case that is hardly unusual by the way, the situation becomes more complex. Clearly, you went to med school, worked in a hospital have your M.D. on your business card – but are you a physician and even more importantly do you feel like a physician?

Whether you are a physician or you are not is not an easy question to answer. There is a really fine line in this whole game. Would you call somebody a physician who “just” finished Med School, but didn’t do residency? Or what if the person only did 3 months of residency and never finished? Or an M.D. going into basic research – is she still a physician or rather a scientist? The vocabulary is secondary though. The point we are tying to make in is this post is that there are a lot of physicians out there who really hang onto their degree in medicine, because so much time, money and effort were invested. But what if you start loosing interest in clinical medicine? It’s simply hard to admit to yourself because of the reasons mentioned above: time * money * effort = a lot of lifetime.

These are simple and pithy examples, yet we believe that there are some reasons why this distinction for physicians specifically even evolves. In the beginning of your career and even earlier in medical school, medicine has something mesmerizing. It’s cool and you’ll be highly respected if you are going into medicine. But over the years many find out that medicine as we know it is not what you were taught in med school. Practicing medicine is just a small part of your job, aside from bureaucracy, legal aspects, paychecks, governmental influence and so and so on. Some people start to turn away from medicine and gradually feel the urge to get out of their daily routine, escaping the windowless walls of a hospital and maybe feeling not compensated on a fair basis (at least in Europe).

Now as a physician you can’t just switch jobs. It’s not like in the business world, where you can switch industries within months. In medicine you’ll be in one industry your whole lifetime. That’s good for the patient (longtime, daily routine = quality), but it might suck for you as a physician (repetitive = boring) so it’s hard to get out and do something else. It might be a wrong observation, but there are quite some physicians out there that really consider doing something else for their living, but it’s hard to branch out. Not only from a professional point of view (no epxerience in aspects that are necessary for a business for example) but also in rather psychological terms. It’s hard to admit that being a doctor sucks. It’s frustrating, it’s not well paid and paperwork is overtaking the actual practice of medicine. Again, it’s hard to admit these things if you’ve done nothing else into your entire life, apart from having spent a lot of money on getting where you are at, but as you can see with MedCrunch – there are ways

Eventually you should only be doing things in life that you really, really enjoy. Don’t let yourself distract by social norms or the pride of your parents of you becoming a physician. It’s hard to succumb to your secure and prestigious status in society.

“Only when he enjoys, he can succeed” – …And you could be next.