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By Robert F. Weil

I can't see any reason to become a physician in the U.S. today. To get into medical school, you need to maintain a grade point average over 3.7 throughout high school and college. You generally need to be in the top 2 percent of your graduating class. The courses you take are heavily into science, with plenty of long hours spent in the lab.

Dr. Robert Weil

The cost on your social life is prohibitive and often leads to profound feelings of isolation. Once you enter medical school, it gets much worse.

It's not unusual to study over 60 hours a week in addition to your classwork, hospital rotations, and labs. Studies have shown that medical students put in more weekly hours than any other graduate students.

And when you're done? Your average student debt exceeds $130,000.

This is followed by residency, where you don't get to pick where you'll be living for the next three to 10 years; a computer decides it for you. While putting in 80-hour to 100-hour work weeks for about $40,000/year may sound like a grand time, I can assure you it's not.

When done, you are age 29-35, while your peers have already been in the work force earning income for four or more years.

To complete your training, you will have taken no fewer than four standardized board exams, each more difficult than the last, and failing just one requires remedial work to correct deficiencies.

The failure rates of these exams approaches 50 percent for first-time takers. To become board certified in your specialty requires another exam, often required to secure a job.

I laugh when lawyers say how hard the Bar Exam is. The passing rate is 60 percent, and it's one test, after which, you're admitted to the bar for life. To maintain board certification, you must pass an exam every 10 years. You can lose your job if you don't pass the test. At age 50, you may well be out of your job.

Then, you finally enter the work force.

My usual day was getting up at 5 a.m., exercising, getting to the hospital by 6:30 a.m. to make in-patient rounds, going to my office for morning hours, eating lunch in my car as I drove back to the hospital for lunchtime rounds, back to the office for afternoon hours, then home by 7 p.m. for dinner and to tuck my young children into bed. Then, its two hours of catching up on exhaustive journal reading (which arrive in the mail every single day, along with the internet). That's because you have to prove Continuing Medical Education credits of 100+ hours every two years. If you don't complete those hours and have adequate documentation of same, you lose your state-issued license and can no longer practice.

What other career demands this?

This all comes at a tremendous mental and physical cost. According to recent statistics, the medical field is among the top five in suicide rates, severe depression, and intractable debt.

And for all of this? You earn a median income of $204,000 (2011 statistic).

My son's friend, in his second year out of college with a degree in economics, received a cash bonus twice that amount.

Patients would often argue that a mere $20 co-pay for my valuable time was exorbitant and refuse to pay, then would drive down the road and shell out $100 for a hairstylist with no required education, and not bat an eyelash. We were constantly using collection agencies to get what we were owed. And don't even mention the constant threat of lawsuits and the emotional burden that entails.

Worse, you're not even your own boss. Your fees are set by the insurance companies. For any service provided, they pay you the UCR (usual, customary, and reasonable) fees they set. For a 15-minute appointment, that can mean as little as $23, no exceptions. If I complained, they would simply remove me from their panel of providers, and that would mean a loss of patients.

It's becoming increasingly clear that all U.S. physicians will soon become federal government employees. That will further decrease autonomy, and medicine will become just another job, like working at the DMV.

The shortage of physicians is real and worsening. Given what it takes to become and remain a physician, I cannot recommend this career to any intelligent high school student when so many better career paths exist with higher satisfaction rates.

If they really want to help people, they're better off becoming engineers and building bridges. In this way, they can help 20,000 users a day driving to and from work, more people than they'll ever help in a 50-year career of serving in the trenches of an emotionally demanding medical practice.

Unless things change dramatically with respect to meaningful tort reform, more robust financial aid for medical students, less demanding state-mandated CME requirements and annual excessive licensure fees, and fewer state and federal government intrusions on clinical practice, the best and brightest students will, and most definitely should, choose alternative careers.

There are plenty of other ways to help people without killing yourself while doing so.

Dr. Robert F. Weil writes from Derry Township.