Why medical school should start at age 28
A merican medicine is at a crossroads as doctors begin to reject a cruel, exhausting educational model and a minefield-ridden practice landscape. Hands wring over the worsening physician shortage, yet little happens to ease physicians’ administrative workloads or student loan burdens.
These challenges have led to unacceptably high rates of work-related psychiatric illness and suicide, with physician burnout entering the national lexicon. At the root of some doctors’ anguish and despair has been a sense that medicine is their only option – because it is all they know how to do – rather than a fulfilling job they choose to do.
Indeed, discussing one’s early exit strategy, whether to retirement or to a completely different job, has become all the rage in private online physician communities like Sermo. And doctors in practice for as few as seven years are quitting at an alarming rate, even as baby boomers are filling clinics and hospitals with their complex arrays of medical problems.
While U.S. medicine is in need of immense reform, including intuitive electronic health records and higher pay for primary care, there is something physicians-to-be can do to protect themselves from some of the problems that plague doctors today: spend their formative years working at a first career and meeting their life partners, and wait to begin medical school until age 28. Continue reading “Why medical school should start at age 28”