 Why do doctors recommend not to become a doctor? What happens if you sleep through one of your pages? Do doctors look down on nurses? Alright guys, in today's video we are going to do some rapid fire questions on what it's like to become a doctor. I basically found some of the most commonly asked questions through Google, Reddit, Quora, YouTube and I'm just going to be answering them really quickly and these are questions that have been asked for people in med school, in medicine, and also not out of it. So I hope you guys enjoy and also after watching this video make sure you go ahead and drop your own comments so we can just make this a series. Q&A's are kind of fun. Let's do it really quickly for you. My name is Lakshman. This is the empty journey channel completely dedicated to helping students doing well on their journey to becoming a doctor and whatever else that they may want to pursue. So if you're new here consider subscribing and liking the video but let's get into question number one. I'm gonna challenge myself to do rapid fire because sometimes I just end up in a little silly coin talking about absolutely nothing. So question number one, what's the worst part of becoming a doctor? I'm gonna try to do this on the top of my head. Definitely one the administrative BS. I hate doing notes because I promise I probably do notes 70% of the time and see my patients 30% so that definitely has to be it and I just get so much back pain from sitting in chairs. If they made standing desk or like beanbag chairs or like somebody to just give me a massage halfway through that'd be amazing but unfortunately that doesn't happen. I would definitely say all the clerical work paperwork that you have to do as a physician to get the patients in out of the door take care of them and definitely getting them home. So question number two, do doctors visit other doctors? Now this is a really good question because you'll probably hear this that doctors are by far the worst patients and my wife if you had to ask her will probably tell you 101% that is absolutely true and there's a few reasons why it's true. One, sometimes we just feel or at least think we know what's going on so if I have back pain I think it's like a muscle thing I don't need to go see a physician because I am one. Two, sometimes it's just a waste of resources personally for me if I already kind of know what the next steps would do. If I already know what the doctor and the clinic is going to do for me then I just don't want to waste the resources if I can do a lot of them myself. So if I need to prescribe myself some medication or have a friend that's a physician do it for me then sometimes that's easier route than me actually having to go see the physician. Now thankfully I'm pretty healthy so I don't actually need very many medications and usually ibuprofen and Tylenol usually do the trick. Next up are doctors over compensated in the United States? That's a pretty interesting question and you know obviously I'm biased because one I've not made a full doctor salary but I will have to say absolutely not. If you actually look at the breakdown of the medical field which seems to be very costly and it is very costly for the United States if you look at the proportion of money that actually ends up going to physicians and healthcare providers comparatively to other things like insurance and administrators the number is actually skewed towards the latter. So if anything doctors actually work many years to become a physician the studying the loans that we have to go through and then the hours that we you know train and do to actually become a physician for example yesterday I did 28 hours straight and so those kinds of things are a little bit ridiculous and I'm still getting paid like an entry level salary for a physician or like a resident. So do I think doctors are over compensated? No. Do I think the medical system needs some refiguring to make sure that the final consumer which is the patient actually has a cheaper experience? Absolutely. What are the top qualities a doctor should possess? Now obviously this is going to be individual preference. Number one has to be you have to be a good listener and you have to be able to grab pieces of information to then be able to help your patients. You will find that especially if patients are storytellers but not like good storytellers what we call a bad historian they will probably talk to you for 20 minutes but then you don't actually get any helpful information to actually make some meaningful impact in their care. You have to be a good listener and realize if the patient is actually telling you something that is going to be able to help how you manage that and if somebody is diverting and they're like just like having a kind of a soliloquy about nothing then you'll be like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa let's redirect and let me ask you a question in a different way. So quality number one definitely has to be you have to be a good listener and a good redirector. Do you just have to be personal? I think a lot of medicine is about being interactive with patients because you can be a really smart physician that suck at patient care and patient rapport and it's you're just not going to look like a good physician your patients are going to enjoy you and even small things are going to become a big deal but if you are a good people person if you're good at social skills and interacting with people you can usually build the skills of learning medicine or finding the answers to questions you don't know and still being able to take care of your patients. So definitely active listening building rapport with your patients and number three is really pattern recognition all of medicine is basically being able to see something once and then using it in a different kind of experience different situation so if you take care of a patient with a fever kind of knowing the few things that you considered the few things you missed and then being able to apply the things that you missed to a future patient then eventually when you take care of hundreds and thousands of patients over the span of your career you just have so much experience and pattern recognition to be able to give them adequate care. Do doctors look down on nurses? So this is a really interesting question and I have seen a little bit of both on both sides. I have seen physicians who have unfortunately haven't treated the nurses adequately haven't treated the nurses to the quality that they deserve because honestly guys I love my nurses they do so much extraneous work they're at the patient's bedside 24-7 and honestly sometimes they know more about the patients than I do and actually well almost always do they know more about the patients than I do and there's such an essential role and key player in the care of that patient so for any time that I see you know either myself kind of not interact with a nurse in a proper way or if I see any of my peers I just don't feel good and I feel like you have to have that camaraderie with your nurses your physical therapist your occupational therapist and anyone who's involved in the patient care because as a physician while you may be the leader in the care of that patient there are so many other people who are essential to make sure that one you have good communication with them and two they're going to be essential of communicating back whatever is going on with that patient so do doctors look down on nurses? Personally I don't because there are things that the nurses do that I just absolutely suck at if you try to have me put an IV versus nurse, nurse wins 100% of the time. If you have the nurses kind of recommend different things to make the patient more comfortable especially being a resident right now the nurses win 100% of the time so the training that a nurse gets the experience that they have sometimes I rely on them a lot and they've saved my butt so many times so I'm super grateful for them but have I had experiences where I've seen colleagues or other physicians kind of look down upon nurses or speak down upon them absolutely and I don't think that should happen but sometimes I find that in the heat of taking care of a patient the physician will sometimes forget about the feelings of the people in between that and obviously that's not the right thing to do. Do doctors regret becoming doctors? Now this question is really going to be dependent on what your ultimate reason of becoming a physician is obviously if you're going to go for financial reasons you're going to be depressed you're going to hate the job because you're going to be forget the money that you make as a physician pretty quickly just because you're going to be spending so many hours and if you're not interested in medicine or in science or taking care of people it's not going to be worth regardless of how many hundreds of thousands of dollars you make or if you go into the field because you want that social stature for people to respect you or because family has pressured you to go into medicine all of those are inappropriate reasons and those are the people who I find who regret becoming a physician because they've gone through so many years every year you go through it is going to be a little bit harder to change paths obviously if you go into med school it's hard to drop out because of all the loans if you get into residency then it becomes even harder to say you know no thanks I don't want to become a physician because you've gone through med school you paid the loan and the further you get into your medical journey like residency and becoming attending it's even harder to step away but on the flip side if you go into medicine to take care of people to scratch your own itch of curiosity making a change doing research whatever it may be I personally love the interactions that I have with people that are sick and then being able to see the difference it makes in both their lives when they go home as well as their lives of everyone who's dependent on them those are like my biggest reasons of going into medicine those things always kind of have echoed through all my experiences and so do I regret being a physician at this point no and all the hard work I've done to this point is absolutely worth the next question is what is it like being a doctor now this is obviously a very broad umbrella question but I'll give you a little bit of both my schedule as well as kind of what I do on a day to day now it depends on if I'm working in a clinic or if I'm working in the hospital but a lot of my rotations right now as a resident is in the hospital so a lot of days I'll be going to the hospital around 5 30 to 7 o'clock and I'll be finishing anywhere from 3 to 5 but there are days where I stay overnight and I am admitting patients for my own team and I get to leave the next day at 11 so those are like 28 hour shifts and then throughout the day I'm doing a variety of tasks though in the early parts of the day I'm usually seeing old patients I'm seeing what their vitals look like if I left for the day I'm looking what their labs and their blood work has been like I'm looking at what their imaging is doing and then what I do throughout the day really varies so at the start of the day I really look at my old patients and look at their lab work what are their vitals make sure everything that we did from the day before is actually helping them and making sure that they're not going in the wrong direction and in the early parts of the day before noon I'm just making changes with my supervising attendings and the rest in the morning before noon we're making sure that I'm seeing all the patients with my supervising attendings and the rest of my team members um and then they give any recommendations that the patient would need for their care the rest is afternoon the day would be spending carrying out whatever plan whether it be kind of a procedure on a patient or calling a consultant and making sure that they give me their recommendations if a patient has something that I feel is a little bit over my head um and then making sure that everyone is kind of tucked in before I leave for the next question is how many patients do you take care of now me personally when I'm on a rotation inside the hospital it can usually be anywhere from 10 to 15 um the earlier you start in residency you typically take care of less people so last year I would take care about eight people at a time and then I would have another person who's also a first year resident so we would together take care of eight people and then I would have a supervising resident which is now my role now would oversee all of the patients both of us take care of and so now it's very common for me to oversee a team of like 12 patients admit new patients discharge them and kind of know what's going on with all of them and then when I'm working in clinic with my own personal primary care patients I usually see about four to five in the morning and four to five in the afternoon so next question is pretty interesting because I always worried about this before starting residency and the question is what happens if you sleep through one of your pages now thankfully this hasn't happened to me but sometimes you do run in situations where you get three to four pages at once and you're flipping through them and you may miss one or you're looking at a page you notice it you acknowledge it but then you're going through something that's more emergent maybe a patient is crashing or not doing so well and so you tell yourself I'm going to call this page back as soon as I'm done with this but sometimes you forget but usually what happens is if you do forget to call that page back or if you do sleep through a page they'll usually just page you again and pages have a tendency of being very loud I try to keep mine on vibrate because I can usually do a good job feeling that vibration but other people will turn it up to the max volume and it's super super annoying so in this episode with two more questions and the next one is going to be why do doctors recommend not to become a doctor now this is a really good question and it kind of reminds me of when you ask a player who played football if they would let their kids also play football and a lot of times you find that people will say no because they've gone through the brutality of football and in a similar way you have a doctor who will say you know I don't know if I would actually tell all my kids to pursue medicine and here's the caveat the thing is is that usually people who go through medicine go through the track kind of continuously they go through college they go through med school they go through residency so every phase is hard every phase is long and we really don't know different but the delayed gratification a lot of times there's a little bit of regret when we realize that the job isn't completely the way we hoped it would be you know if you work 12 years for a career you would hope that it was everything you wanted and more but sometimes when we go through things like writing notes and administrative tasks they usually kind of can get in your way of enjoying the job so when you take the years of training it took for you to becoming a physician to the not so ideal kind of job compared to what you wished it was sometimes people say you know maybe I would have done something else and that's completely reasonable now personally I'm at the latter end of my training and only two years away into my full fledged physician without any supervision but if I had to ask myself would I do it again it is tricky to say yeah I would but that's also because I'm thinking about all the years of training I'd have to do again but I really enjoy the job so probably yeah I would recommend doing it but the physicians who probably wouldn't recommend doing it again probably have a huge discrepancy of what they wish their career looked like to what it probably looks like to them last question for that episode what did you dread the most during med school I have to say it's this experience of feeling like I'm always being evaluated during your first two years of medical school you have grade and test after test and it feels like regardless of how you did on your past 10 tests the next one is the most important then you have board exams where you're compared to your peers for residency spots and specialties and then you have clinical rotations where you have to not only make the grades but also stand out on how you present patients how you take care of patients and a lot of those make sense because you obviously have to be able to compare what a good student and a good future doctor will look like but that process of going through four years would have felt like almost constantly being evaluated every step of the way that gets really cumbersome really burdensome and it really just makes you dislike every aspect of med school but again when you take a step back and you realize that yes evaluations are part of med school they're not enjoyable there's still a lot of other elements of medicine being on the medical journey that are enjoyable and make it worth it but that guys summarized it for this video on what it's like to becoming a physician make sure you comment down below with what the questions you want me to cover in future videos and I'll be happy to do so once we have a nice future compilation for another q&a video thank you guys so much for always watching on youtube if you are make sure you hit that like button if you enjoyed this content and supporting the channel and also hit that subscribe button to get multiple videos just like this one on a weekly basis and if you're listening to this on a podcast platform make sure you hit subscribe to the TMJ show on your favorite podcast listening platform but thank you guys so much for making it to the end to making it to the end of this video and the podcast hopefully I've been able to help to you on your journey thank you for being a part of mine I'll see you guys in the next one peace