Becoming a doctor can be one of your best or one of the worst decisions you ever make in your life. It all depends on whether you chose a medical school for the right reasons. Before you decide to become a doctor, you must thoroughly understand the job’s responsibilities. Here are a few details about medical practitioners that you must know before you decide on becoming one.
1.Nurses Can Be Your Best Friend or Your Enemy
You should consider yourself lucky if you never get on bad terms with a nurse. Nurses are the heart and soul of hospitals. They don’t have deep knowledge about medicines like you do, but they have specific advantages that you will need throughout your years as a doctor. Being on good terms with nurses ensures that they will make your life as a doctor easier by helping catch your mistakes or choosing to not page you every second over insignificant stuff.
2.You Won’t Always Have Answers
You shouldn’t expect that after you finish medical school you’ll become an answering machine that knows the answer to every question. Despite the wonderful knowledge you currently know about the human body from modern medicine, there is a lot about the human body that is yet to be discovered. It is okay to speak honestly about uncertainties in your patient’s case with them and help them understand the possibilities and options they have. It is never okay to share false information or possibilities as if they are facts with a patient.
3.It is Okay to Ask For Help
For doctors, asking for help is a constant practice. No doctor can actually work alone, you’ll constantly need to ask other doctors, from your specialty or other specialties, and nurses for help which is totally fine. In fact, a good doctor is one that can actually call for a hand when they need one. When you become a doctor, you can’t in any way let your pride come in the way of asking for help because people’s lives are on the line.
4.Medical Schools are Costly
Medical schools are not at all cheap. You will probably finish your education with a ton of debt hanging over your head, but on the bright side, practicing medicine is a highly paid job with a salary around the 6 figures. Due to the debts and probably the not-so-bright credit history, you may not be able to take a loan from the bank for a while or spare that much from your salary which is why it takes doctors a long time before they can have a house to their name. There’s actually a solution for this called a mortgage loan. You can browse for the best physician mortgage loan rates to find something that is suitable for you. Physician mortgage loans make it easier for doctors and physicians to buy their first residence early on in their careers. Those loans don’t require PMI or insurance even with small or no down payment at all.
5.You Never Stop Learning
You shouldn’t ever expect that after you finish school, you’ll have all the knowledge in the world. Because medicine is constantly evolving and scientists and doctors are always discovering new facts, cures, and methods to operate, you’ll always have to learn something new. As a doctor, you can never know too much.
6.It Will Always Be Hard When a Patient Dies
Despite what many people may be telling you before you become a doctor about patients’ deaths, you’ll never be ready for that moment. It will always be hard for you when you lose a patient, and even with your ability to help relieve patients with their sickness, you should know that you can’t save everyone. The important thing is to not hold yourself accountable for a patient’s death because you probably did the best you could at the moment.
Being a doctor can be a huge responsibility for some people, but it is also a gift to be able to be on the front line helping people be safe and healthy. It may seem time-consuming to the point you don’t have a second for yourself, from as early as when you go to medical school, but that’s not entirely true. Being a doctor means long shifts and emergency stays at the hospital attending to patients, but you still get to have time for yourself if you want. It is actually the number one recommendation from doctors to prioritize the time you have with yourself.
