Physicians and Surgeons
This is almost certainly the most difficult and highly trained job you can try and get. It’s a great deal more demanding than just getting the right college degree, that’s for sure. There’s the fist college degree, usually, but not exclusively, pre-med and takes four years. Then another college degree, the doctoral (an MD, rather than a Ph.D.) and then on top of that anything from 2 to 6 years further training on the job before anyone thinks that you are really qualified. It’s also, once all that training’s been finished, extremely hard work, with more than half the profession working 60 hours a week or more.
On the other hand, it’s also very highly paid. There aren’t all that many areas where the average income is around a quarter million dollars a year. After all that training, all those college loans, you might think they’ve earned that much actually. Worth noting here that the military has an excellent scheme for doctors, including a lot of potential subsidy for the training.
Now we all know what it is that doctors do (Just to remind: physicians are the ones that we spend most of our time with. Surgeons are the ones who cut us up and stitch us back together again.) so I think the interesting thing is to look at our EQSQ personality tests.
With all of that scientific training and the requirement to actually diagnose someone (which is systemizing in a fairly pure form) we would think we were looking exclusively for male brain types. But that isn’t quite true I think. There are areas where empathy (for example, in pediatrics) is very important too. So I think this is one of those professions where there are possibly different personality types within it. Everyone needs to have strong male brain skills, yes, but then some also need to have strong female brain or empathic ones as well. So we’d probably be looking for male and balanced brain types here.
December 3rd, 2006 at 9:43 pm
Tim, do you think there is a difference in personalities (or, more specifically, male vs. female brain types) between doctors in the UK and doctors in the US? What I mean is, do you think the social health care system affects the type of person who goes into the profession?
While, as you stated, the US pays doctors an average of $250,000, the UK (as you well know) does not. According to http://www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/details/Default.aspx?Id=553,
UK doctors make, at best, around half. Early on, they make merely 20,000 or so pounds.
While I’d assume this means there will be more doctor empathizers in the UK than in the US, I’m not entirely sure. (I lived for one year in Wales, and had seen physicians in both Wales and England, and this did not strike me as being the case - or did I merely misinterpret that famous English reserve?)
Can we assume the higher systemizing minds would be more concerned with the money they are making? Or is it simply that systemizing jobs simply tend to pay more than empathizing ones (because they tend to be more involved with practical and necessary needs, or those that have the potential to create more capital?).
December 8th, 2006 at 8:46 pm
No, I wouldn’t think that there would be such differences actually. Certainly the intelligence requirements needed to get into med school are the same. Once you take out the medical malpractice insurance costs (very high in the US, paid for the doctors in the UK) then there’s not much difference in pay, in fact it might even be higher in the UK. £106,000 is now the average for a GP, around $200,000…and the UK is a poorer country so all wages are about 30% lower. So relatively, doctors might be better off in the UK.
Here’s one piece of intelligence you might now know: all GPs are in fact in private practice in the UK. They contract with the government NHS, but are not part of it. Also, most senior hospital doctors (surgeons etc) also have private practices. So, while it’s an interesting idea there, I’m not sure that there’s really that much to it.
Now with nursing, maybe….