Todd Eller: Why Someone Decides to Go into Medicine

Whether you are a physician, a nurse, a medical tech or someone else who works in a medical office or hospital, this is a very good question to ask yourself: why did you decide to go into medical field? The UCLA Career Center is the largest career center in the world. This question was asked of many individuals who were going into family practice, surgery, nursing and other medical careers. Many different people go into medicine for many different reasons. The respondents gave several different answers including:

• wanting to help people

• a fascination with science

• money

• prestige

• respect

• or all of the above.

However, the one thing that kept coming back as a firm answer was the absolute thrill a person would feel when they could actually change somebody for the better. Harvard Business School and the University of British Columbia conducted a study whereby individuals could anonymously keep money for themselves or use it to help others. Overwhelmingly, the individuals who chose altruistic activities were much more highly satisfied and happier.

So, now we come to a paradox. According to Medical Economics, Primary Care Doctors were asked if they were sorry they chose their career. Seventy – three percent stated “yes.” How can this be? Doctors and health practitioners save lives and help people every day. Fifty – six percent of nurses stated they were sorry they choose nursing (Medscape, 2015). Forty – four percent of Med Techs reported not being satisfied with their careers (Educational Health, 2008). So, what exactly is going on? As you know, dealing with insurance companies, red tape, new coding regulations, licensing requirements and finding out that being a doctor, nurse or health practitioner also means that you must have knowledge of how to run a business and bring in patients causes stress.

Quick Story

I asked a doctor to do a free evaluation for a doctor’s office. This doctor had major complaints from several patients. One included that the patient called the doctor’s office and wanted him to review his blood tests to see if he needed any testosterone or other such supplements. The patient made it clear that he did not want to see the doctor if he did not have all of the necessary lab work beforehand. The secretary over the phone assured this first time patient that his lab work was complete and the doctor was ready to see him and review the results. When the patient arrived at the doctor’s office, and he met the doctor, the doctor told him that he needed more blood work to be done before he give him an evaluation. Needless to say, the patient was extremely upset. He gave the doctor all kinds of negative reviews on several websites, and refused ever see the doctor again and insisted upon his money back. This doctor was actually highly qualified and had a reputation for being very kind. However, because of the lack of communication between himself and his staff, many hours were wasted dealing with this one patient who is dissatisfied and the repercussions of having negative reviews put all over the internet.

Quick Story #2

Another one of the authors of this study was asked to do an evaluation of a medical doctor who decided to go into cosmetic procedures. This doctor had poured all of his life savings into new laser equipment, websites, brochures and other social media to promote his business. This particular doctor hired some staff members were simply children of friends of his. One staff member dressed inappropriately, had a nose ring and no medical training whatsoever. However, she was the one responsible for trying to sell cosmetic medical procedures to the patients coming for a free evaluation. The doctor who owned this clinic was so overwhelmed with the patients that he was actually seeing and dealing with all the advertising strategies that yet implemented, that he was not able to take the time to train or properly vet the type of staff he had in his office. Furthermore, he spent over $5000 for a website that hardly anybody viewed. Because of his lack of knowledge of variables such as SEO, scientific website design and how to create truly optimum YouTube videos, very few people were looking at his social media. This doctor would also spend hours writing very long articles that were extremely detailed and informative about health and medical matters. However, once again very few people read such articles because he did not understand that most individuals are extremely busy and will only spend a few seconds reading what a doctor writes or says on the internet.

If you think that these types of stories are anecdotal, or that they don’t pertain to you, please look at the statistics below. I want to emphasize that we are not saying that making money is the number one concern of medical practitioners. However, when economics and money get in the way of doing the kind of work that you truly love to do which is helping patients, that is when dissatisfaction and stress goes through the roof. There are some doctors who want to make as much money as possible. There are other medical practitioners and nurses who simply want to make a good living and focus on helping their patients as much as possible and seek great happiness from good work. It is not the intention of this book to simply make you money for the sake of making money. We do feel that as much work that you have put into becoming a medical professional, that it is tragic that medical schools do not teach properly on how to run a medical business in terms of advertising, sales and perhaps above all time management. Because these skills are taken for granted and because so many physicians are so brilliant that they feel that these types of skills will be easy to learn, so many doctors are dissatisfied with their work as our nurses and medical technicians.