The Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Not Go To Medical School... And The Single Reason You Should

Why you should not go to medical school - a gleefully biased rant.

Dr. Ali Binazir has some strong opinions about what you should, and should not do in medical school... and even if you should go.

Here's a synopsis from one of his posts on why you should not go to medical school... and the one reason you should.

By Ali Binazir MD:

In the few years since I’ve graduated from medical school, there has been enough time to go back to medical practice in some form, but I haven’t and don’t intend to, so quit yer askin’, dammit.  But of course, people keep on asking.  Their comments range from the curious — “Why don’t you practice?” — to the idealistic — “But medicine is such a wonderful profession!” — to the almost hostile — “Don’t you like helping people, you heartless ogre you?”

Since it’s certain that folks will continue to pose me this question for the rest of my natural existence, I figured that instead of launching into my 15-minute polemic on the State of Medicine each time, interrupting the flow of Hefeweizen on a fine Friday eve, I could just write it up and give them the URL.  So that’s what I did.

Now, unfettered by my prior obligations as an unbiased pre-med advisor, here are the myriad reasons why you should not enter the medical profession and the one (count ‘em — one) reason you should.  I have assiduously gone through these arguments and expunged any hint of evenhandedness, saving time for all of you who are hunting for balance.  And here are the reasons:

1) You will lose all the friends you had before medicine.

2) You will have difficulty sustaining a relationship and will probably break up with or divorce your current significant other during training.

3) You will spend the best years of your life as a sleep-deprived, underpaid slave.

4) You will get yourself a job of dubious remuneration.

5) You will have a job of exceptionally high liability exposure.

6) You will endanger your health and long-term well-being.

7) You will not have time to care for patients as well as you want to.

8) You will start to dislike patients — and by extension, people in general.

9) People who do not even know you will start to dislike you.

10) You’re not helping people nearly as much as you think.

And now, the only reason why you should go into medicine:

You have only ever envisioned yourself as a doctor and can only derive professional fulfillment in life by taking care of sick people.

There’s really no other reason, and lord knows the world needs docs.  Prestige, money, job security, making mom happy, proving something, can’t think of anything else to do, better than being a lawyer, etc are all incredibly bad reasons for becoming a doc.

You should become a doc because you always wanted to work for Médecins Sans Frontières and your life will be half-lived without that.  You should become a doc because you want to be the psychiatrist who makes a breakthrough in schizophrenia treatment.  You should become a doc because you love making sick kids feel better and being the one to reassure the parents that it’ll all be OK, and nothing else in the world measures up to that.  Or as my general surgery resident put it, you should become a doc because “my dad was an ass surgeon, my big brother’s an ass surgeon, and by god I’m going to become an ass surgeon.”

But woe betide you if there’s anything else, anything at all, that would also give you that fulfillment. Because pursuit of medicine would preclude chasing down that other dream and a whole lot more – a dream that could be much bigger, much more spectacular, much more enriching for yourself and humanity than being a physician.  Just ask John Keats, Walker Percy, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Giorgio Armani, or Michael Crichton (some of these guys being more alive than others these days).  Or you can just ask me a few years down the road, by which time I should have a blog entry for that question, too.

You can read the entire post on Dr. Binazir's blog here:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/abinazir/2005/05/23/why-you-should-not-go-to-medical-school-a-gleefully-biased-rant/

About: Dr. Ali Binazir has an A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard College, M.D. from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, M.Phil. from Cambridge University and is a Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist and NLP Master Practitioner.  has written books that include the #1 rated dating book on Amazon, The Tao of Dating as well as for the Huffington Post. He blogs at Ali Binazir