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And the downshot for women is if they spend 10 years on their career they are now 10 years older.
The tragedy of female doctors: they go through med school, finish residency, and say okay, time to find Mr. Right. But they're 30 years old. They want to marry another doctor, but male doctors are busy marrying 22 year old nurses.
Eh. A lot of the doctors in my class are...with other doctors. So too, there's plenty of shorter doctors - 5'7" and under - that would be thrilled to date and marry a 30yo resident or doctor.
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This is a failure of the US medical education system and not representative of global norms.
I find the very idea of pre-med disgusting, an utter waste of 2 years of one's life, especially when it's glaringly obvious that most of the world produces competent doctors without it. (I still think the average US doctor is modestly better than the average elsewhere, simply through selection pressures).
Then you have med school and then a mandatory residency without which you can't practise at all (barring rural Texas), taking up anywhere from 4-7 years of your life making less than minimum wage if you account for total hours worked.
The final payoff is huge, but even then you're just wasting years of your life, and for no better reason than that's how it's always been done. Fuck the notion of needing "well-rounded" doctors, when I go the ER the last thing I want or need is to debate the underpinnings of stoic philosophy when I'm dying of acute appendicitis. And if they're a palliative care doctor, they can just go read Seneca in their free time.
On the other hand, it's perfectly possible for an Indian or British doctor to graduate med school at 22, finish a good deal of their training by 26 or 27, and then just work.
Now, I'm unashedly elitist and would rather date other doctors, and while doctors marrying nurses was once common enough in India, it's become a rarety as the sex ratio has flipped to be in the favor of women in medicine.
Maybe the gulf between the two professions is smaller in the US and the UK, but in the latter, most docs marry other professionals or doctors themselves.
I also have doubts about the importance of a doctor's education in the long run.
Given two doctors who have been practicing for 10 years. One had a much more thorough education, but the other has a good habit of reading the latest advancements. Which would you prefer? Under these conditions it seems a bit silly to make such sacrifices just to maximize the capabilities of doctors at the moment they enter practice, with much less attention paid to their continual training.
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