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macNchzyesterday at 1:24 PM1 replyview on HN

On top of these, a few things with the training process also jump out to me from a "can we attract smart and motivated people to this work" point of view: the sheer cost of medical school that creates an imperative for high pay down the line, coupled with a real chance that you can wind up without a residency match but still owe all that money for school, and in particular the grueling nature of the residency system, currently capped at only 80 hours/week since 2003, because people were working >100 and making mistakes.

There are arguments that these are factors that filter out the people who are not sufficiently motivated, but it's hard for me to imagine there aren't a lot of bright young people who might be interested in medicine, but see one of the various paths that exist today to making doctor-level money with only an undergraduate degree and in an environment that doesn't require a working schedule that actively harms your health.


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nradovyesterday at 2:45 PM

Yep, it's a huge risk. If a student enters medical school and realizes halfway through that they don't want to be a doctor then they're still stuck with a huge debt and no way to pay it off. It's not like undergraduate education where you can fairly easily switch majors from chemistry to mathematics or whatever.