Saturday, August 31, 2013

5 Horrifying Truths About Being a Medical Doctor

By James Altucher

On paper, being a doctor seems pretty great. The money is good, it makes everyone around you feel inferior, and you get a diploma that literally gives you permission to play God.

But being a doctor isn't just about lots of sex and cocaine parties -- in fact, it's mostly not about that at all.

#5. Doctors Hate You, and They Hate Their Lives


On average, one doctor a day kills himself. Despite what you hear about lawyers, doctors actually have the highest suicide rate, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association. It's even worse among female doctors. You think they like looking at you with your clothes off? You're disgusting. How dare you. How dare you. The suicide rate among female doctors is 2.3 times the national average, and the suicide rate of male doctors is 1.4 times higher.

Dr. Charles Reynolds, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and, statistically speaking, a likely suicide waiting to happen, says, "Undiagnosed and untreated depression is the culprit here." No one is diagnosing the depression? In doctors? Do we need to create an additional breed of doctor that only doctors other doctors, or will this new super-doctor then be more likely to kill himself even harder because of all of his undiagnosed depression? How many different kinds of mega-doctors do we need to add to the doctor hierarchy until we get this suicide situation under control? And why all the suicide? Why can't they just drink their problems away, like normal people?

#4. Your Doctor Might Be Drunk

Oh shit. In a study done on the American College of Surgeons, 15 percent of male surgeons and 26 percent of female surgeons suffered from alcohol abuse and dependence. That might not seem super high, but it is higher than the national average. What's more alarming is that a significant portion reported having errors during surgery in the prior three months because of their dependence. The stress of being a doctor and being responsible for saving lives drove these doctors to drink, which, in turn, contributed to mistakes made in surgery. Which likely drove them to even MORE drinking, and now we're on an infinity loop of drunk doctors cutting noses off and leaving their scalpels in butts before going off to drink away their stress.

Doctors are also more likely to abuse "prescribed opioids and benzodiazepines," which I've never heard of but can only assume are future sci-fi drugs that only doctors know about. And you take them in weird future sci-fi, like you get high by looking at them. You smile at a pill and suddenly "OH SHIT I'M ON ACID."

If you want to be safe, it turns out, be operated on by someone who is male, who has children, and who specializes in operating on veterans. For some reason, these are the people least likely to be drunk while operating on you.

#3. The Deaths -- Oh Loooord the Deaths

People make mistakes, and we're not going to vilify doctors because they're human; most of our best friends are human. That said, 98,000 people die every year from mistakes doctors make.

98,000. No wonder they're so depressed.

Read the rest here.

1 comment:

  1. You missed the BIG one: Your doctor may be totally and completely incompetent...

    ReplyDelete