Years ago, upon completion of law school in Maryland, a degree called an LLB (Bachelor of Laws) was awarded.
As requirements changed and a 4 year college degree became a prerequsite to admission to law school, the members of the bar were successful in having the degree changed to a JD (Juris Doctor). A lawyer began to advertise himself as Dr. and the bar association objected. the matter was litigated and taken to Maryland’s highest court which agreed with the lawyer. The surname of the successful litigant: Doctor.

I commented to this once and it didn’t get posted. So this is a test, only a test. OK, can’t post anonymously, must have valid email. Try this.

I feel like I’m being targeted as a radiologist. Well I’m still in residency, but in my case that means I’ve been out of medical school for 4 years. I currently make less than $35 a year POSTtax living in Boston as a resident, and this is after college, medical school, and 4 years of post-MD training, with the associated debts of the last 12 years. This is the situation virtually all residents who haven’t completed post-graduate (i.e., residency) training make.

Most doctors work very hard. Some fields work harder than others. Some fields of medicine are “thinking” fields–spend a lot of time thinking about patient’s problems. Some fields of medicine are “doing” fields–not much brain-power needed, but lots of manual dexterity required (surgery?). In most fields you take call, where there is periodic responsibility for taking care of patients with problems in the middle of the nights, weekend, holiday, or evening. Many doctors probably are workaholics, averaging greater than 60-80 hrs/week when you include time reviewing journals, paperwork, and weekend hours. Most doctors have to quietly accept instances when patients verbally abuse them. Most doctors have to tell patients for the first time that they are suffering from a life-threatening illness, or that they’re going to die soon. Most doctors have to frequently deal with patients upset that their appointment started late, even if it’s because the doctor had to spend an extra 30 minutes consoling the patient who was just told she has breast cancer, or because the last patient arrived 15 minutes late. . . Most doctors sacrifice personal and family life because have so many clinical obligations, or because they’ve spent so much time building their career that they don’t know how to develop a good family life.

On the other hands, most young doctors these days know that the age of unqualified high reimbursement is over. Most people these day enter medicine becase they want to take care of friends, family, and other patients. Most doctors love their jobs–they’re not doing it just because it’s a good way to make money. Granted, it’s much easier to sink that much time and effort in training when you know there’s greener grass on the other side. Sleep is easier to sacrifice if there is a perceptable reward.

I happen to love radiology as a field of medicine. It combines my love of technology, imaging (photography), and medicine. I work long days, averaging between 60-100 hours a week. In a given 10-12 hour shift I may read 40 cross-sectional studies, which have an average of 300-500 images a study. Calculate that out–in a day I could easily look at 10,000 images, and that’s without considering the time required to dictate reports, review the typed reports for accuracy, call referring physicians with important results, and provide physician consultations. With all those images, we try not to miss anything, although the sheer volume of work is making it harder and harder to be “perfect.” For better or worse, referring physicians have really taken a liking to “prescribing” radiologic studies too, in hopes that we’ll provide the answers they may not otherwise be able to establish.

I don’t know how much money I’ll make after residency. I have heard figures varying between $100-500 pretax, depending on if you live on a coast (less pay), if you work at a major teaching hospital (less pay) or in private practice, and what type of specialty training (maybe more pay?) you have. But you know–in the end I’d think that I’ve worked for whatever I make.

Phil — Perhaps someday I’ll meet you in the street and say–”Hey, aren’t you Phil Greenspun?”. I’ve driven by the Cambridge College building so many times and sadly thought–that used to be ArsDigita with the cool car in front, and the grand in the lobby. I was inspired by photo.net, and when I’d hear the ad for Elsa Dorfman on NPR, I’d think of the pictures on photo.net; I had a friend who went to ArsDigita University; I once long ago met one of your 6.171 co-authors when he was still a doctoral student in bld 36; and I even found the web-ized land of pi during the mid 90’s (that was _after_ I wrote a speech for competition on mneumonics and used pi as the example). I thought I’d stoke your narcissism

When did the amount of salary become the indicator of a person’s relevance?

Excuse me, you said you had a doctorate in what? The utter bankruptcy of today’s higher-education institutions has been transferred to the realm of the absurd & morally offensive. “Education’ itself has been the greatest fraud & mumbo-jumbo of the past 100 years: It purports to equip us to live, yet, for the most part, shapes our thinking in a sshadowland type of mentality. (Witness, e.g., the comment attributed attributed to Prof. X re Osama & 9/11, in Phil’s post, supra. PhD. dissertations have become large, more irrelevant, and about as convincing as the defense transcripts from a Michael Jackson defense dossier. Burrowing deeper & deeper into the recondite recesses of some abstruse discipline, PhD candidates — who inhabit a subgroup rife with a distorted sense of self-esteem, bad diets, and crazy mood swings — write papers that are about as lastingly important as the foreward to a Jackie Collins novel. To some extent, of course, we are all poseurs; but is true intelligence a liability these days?

Three quotations are particularly apposite to this discussion:

“The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but the transference of bones from one graveyard to another.” (J. Frank Dobie)

“The governors of this institution…made the awful discovery that they had enrolled upon their staff a person who was unprovided with the Ph.D degree. The man in question had been satisfied to work at Philosophy for her own sweet (or bittersweet) sake, and had disdained to consider that an academic bauble should be his reward. His appt. had thus been made under a misunderstanding. He was not the proper man; and there was nothing to do but to inform him of the fact….There are obvious ways in which the increasing hold of the Ph.D Octopus upon American life can be kept in check….” (William James; 1903!)

“We need education in the obvious, rather than investigation of the obscure.” (O. W. Holmes)

Considering that 5% of doctors are responsible for the majority of all medical malpractice claims, wouldn’t a more prudent strategy in combating medical errors involve weeding out bad doctors?