Another anxiety I can attest to among medical students is this: by the time one has given it a real shot and even tolerated a great deal just to experience the clinical years, and then has decided medicine is definitely not for him, he is already desperately behind in terms of indebtedness.
There's no try-before-you-buy here. Either you've wanted to be a doctor your whole life and you know exactly what you're getting into or you become intrigued by the profession and roll the dice. The indebtedness in the middle of medical school encourages one to simply finish it out to have something to show for all the loans. But an MD is qualitatively useless for almost anything except being a physician. The hapless young person feels trapped by a continuously-losing investment.
Combine this with what I consider to be an exploitative system for apportioning residencies, one in which programs hold almost all the cards and prospective physicians don their pageant smiles as they go on interview tours, and you have a dire career-beginning.
If you talk to others about this, invariably they say, "It gets better." But what they mean is that you will attain a position of safety while you watch what was visited upon you be visited upon others. And you'll still be stuck in medicine, which promises a bourgeois income but not nearly the appropriate remuneration for the dedication and time devoted to it, esp. when one felt forced into it in the first place.
It is a fascinating profession and there's a lot of potential to do people good which is almost unassayable as to value. For certain kinds of people it's a life's work and a worthy ambition. But the way the career is designed now it can be stifling to others.
