Blogging with The Doctor Job

Let’s start this post with a very simple point: Yes, you have a right to an ego.

Physicians are in one of the most respected professions in the world. Your job is the continuation of human life - a noble concept that immediately gives you the right and the privilege to feel proud of yourself. Every doctor in the world should realize how important their roles are, and having an ego is an important part of that.

So, while your ego is a good thing because your profession is a noble one, and the contributions physicians make to society are innumerable, let’s talk about the times when it’s a bad thing.

1. Physicians looking for a job

When you are looking for a new job, or your first job out of residency or fellowship, you have no need for (or right to) an ego. You are among your peers, which means that you are all equals. You are not better or worse than the people who are interviewing you. Your schedule is not more important than the schedule of the physicians who will be interviewing you. And you might be surprised to find out that less than 10% of physician employers will pay for an interviewing physician to come visit! Throwing your ego around will only serve to make you look unprofessional, hard to work with, and undesirable as a potential employee or partner.

2. Physicians taking care of their patients.

In our time talking to physician employers to find out what they do and do not like, one of the biggest dislikes is an egotistical physician who thinks that treating her patients is below her. While the medical profession is a noble one, it is noble because of the selfless nature of it. Rolling up her sleeves, a physician must dive in and get her hands dirty to make sure that each patient is treated and cared for equally. Physicians who refuse to touch patients that might be dirty or have an odor don’t belong in any type of primary care field. Your ego is earned from the constant pursuit of the betterment of health care. You are not entitled to it as soon as you have the MD or MBBS or DO or DPM. If you are a physician solely to make money, you may have been misinformed. Once you calculate the number of hours that go into a normal physician’s work week and figure out their annual salary and how little money some of the health care organizations actually pay for procedures, physicians don’t make very much money without working very hard. The more a physician’s ego gets in the way of practicing and caring for patients, the harder it will be to earn the money that the physician so rightfully deserves.

3. Avenues where the physician does not have expertise.

Defer to experts in fields other than medicine. While most physicians understand this and let attorneys practice law, mechanics fix their car, and hairstylists cut their hair, there is a definable percentage of physicians who let their ego convince them that they know everything. Clearly, this isn’t limited to the medical profession - there is a certain percentage of the human population who think that they know everything. But this is an articles about physicians, and the point still remains valid. Whether it’s quantum physics, replacing an alternator, finding a job, or grammar and sentence structure, there are experts out there who can assist you if you let them.