As a resident, what would you tell your premed self? I am considering getting my MD, please correct any misconceptions, but a resident friend of mine basically warned me against it and to go PA.

A combination of many things, it's a toxic and abusive system with massive risk that you alone must shoulder. If at any point in training someone makes a bad remark about you, you will never work a day in your life and you have hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt that is not dischargable in bankruptcy. Society will throw you onto the street and let you die. Residents commit suicide every year because of this. It is a massive gamble and this insane risk means that trainees are very susceptible to abuse. There is rampant emotional and sometimes sexual abuse in residency because residents can't say or do anything for fear of retaliation. USC just had their cardiology program shut down because they were repeatedly raping trainees. Everyone knew including the program director but trainees couldn't say anything or their lives would literally be over. This happens at other programs too and we only hear about a fraction of it. If you train in a field you are stuck there, it is basically impossible to switch and you don't really have the ability to choose. Your life's passion is dermatology? Too bad you didn't match, you can do family medicine or your loans go to collections and you get fucked. Meanwhile mid-levels can take a weekend course and switch from neurology to surgery to dermatology as they wish. At every point along the path there is constant abuse and hazing. I went through USMC ROTC and residency has been 1000x more abusive. There are rules about what the drill instructors will say to you, there are no such rules in residency. One attending repeatedly insulted and belittled my deceased mother. I can say nothing because I'm trapped. Due to this type of abuse and threats of bad evals from that abusive attending I knew that she could end my career and thus life. I would be working at McDonald's with $300k of debt as a debt slave. Due to that abuse it started to seem reasonable to kill her and then myself. If she can end my life for fun I would have nothing left to stop me from returning the favor. However, I survived, and since this was the only person who ever made up lies about me it ultimately didn't matter. This is too inflammatory so I will delete it soon, but I wanted to let you know what a dysfunctional toxic shit hole this system is.

/r/Residency Thread Parent