NP or Physician for men?

Nurses Men

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Just wondering. Should I go for NP or Physician? I'm 19 years old and have all the time in the world. Sorta not really. I wanna work with patients. Which profession works with patients more often? Money is not the answer. I have plenty to go around without either one of these professions.

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Aww thanks for sharing :)

Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
None, it means I'm a male who wants to be a doctor or NP.

Again, what does your gender have to do with anything?

1. You do not need a doctorate degree to be an NP, not yet at least.

2. You do not need a year of critical care experience to be an NP. Sure you're not thinking CRNA?

4. CRNAs (nursing route) make a boat load of money that can often be comparable to many MDs/DOs

Specializes in Critical Care.
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I've got the salt!

Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
1. You do not need a doctorate degree to be an NP, not yet at least.

2. You do not need a year of critical care experience to be an NP. Sure you're not thinking CRNA?

4. CRNAs (nursing route) make a boat load of money that can often be comparable to many MDs/DOs

If the OP has no interest in nursing, he'd be better served to go to PA school or medical school.

Nice name change, OP.

Baby bunnies are cute.

Thank You! :) I love bunnies too.

As a man who has considered both tracks perhaps ad nauseam, I have come up with some significant differences between the two, and some differences that don't appear to be as significant as people make them out to seem. (Of course, any of y'all of any gender can feel free to shoot down anything I'm saying here. If I'm wrong, I want to know about it for my own benefit, and to be able to benefit others thenceforth!)

1) Nursing gives you more flexibility when it comes to the possibility of "flaming out" or undergoing significant life changes.

Truth be told, you have no idea where you're going to be in a few years. You may think you know... but you don't know. Stuff happens and it does a person well to be able to roll with the punches, as it were. If you go into medical school, you're looking at a bare minimum of 3 years of schooling (usually 4) and a bare minimum of 3 years of residency (up to 8, as I understand, depending upon specialty). And then when you finish, you are qualified to practice in only that one specialty. So, in essence, to go to medical school, you must have a pretty darn good idea of what you want to do with the rest of your life... when you're young... in your case, 19 years old. I'm a pretty smart egg, but at age 38 looking back, I didn't know jack squat about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life when I was 19. I thought I did... but I didn't. Changes came around, I learned more about life and people, and my life path was altered to varying degrees along the way. If you go to med school and you "flame out" along the way, you are saddled with all of that non-dischargeable medical school debt (unless you are wealthy enough to pay cash and not have to accumulate debt) and no way to get the high-paying doctor job that would afford you the ability to pay that debt down.

Now, if you choose to go into nursing, there are "checkpoints" along the way depending upon how you do your education. Some programs offer you LPN training as you pursue your RN training, and you can always go for a BSN and get at least the RN license as well even if not the LPN license. You can go further and pursue an accelerated MSN or DNP, and those programs have the same checkpoints. Basically, at some point in your education, you take the NCLEX-RN and get your RN license. If you "flame out" after that point or decide that further education and training are not what you want to pursue at that time, you still have your RN license and can get a job as an RN. Let's say you do an RN - MSN program. At some point you will complete all of the requirements for a BSN, and if you want to stop the program after you reach that point, you still have your BSN and can use it to get a job. Nursing education is not the all-or-nothing proposition that medical education is.

Further, medical school is, from what I have heard, an extreme workload. Maybe that's okay if you're a kid and have nothing better to do with your life, but let's say that somewhere along the way you meet a person who blows you away and you want to get married. Now we have a change in plans. Suddenly you don't want to spend 100 hours a week studying and doing school work... you want to maintain a relationship. Well, unfortunately, there is no such thing as a part-time medical education. There is also no part-time medical residency... they make you work up to 80 hours per week in residency and there are no residencies that reduce the per-week hours to 40 in exchange for being twice as long to complete.

By contrast, nursing school seems largely designed around the plans and lifestyles of adults and teenagers alike. If you want to go straight into nursing school and work at it full-time like any other collegian, there are programs for that where you can get LPN certification in one year, get RN certification in two, earn a BSN in four, an MSN in six, a DNP in seven, etc. If you are working already or want to work, there are "night and weekend" LPN and RN classes. Once you get your RN, you can find programs for advanced degrees from accredited universities that are 100% online if that's your thing. Even if it isn't, you can go to nursing school, even for an advanced degree, on a part-time basis while you work (presumably as a nurse).

2) Nursing gives you more flexibility with the hours, and number of hours, that you work.

I've read that most doctors work TONS of hours. I've talked with several doctors I know personally and they all say the same thing - TONS of hours. As a nurse, you aren't indentured to that if you don't want to be. People talk all the time about "three 12's per week"... that must be a common schedule. Of course, you can work much more if you want to. I have a cousin who has been a nurse for 18 years and she only works per diem when she's available... which isn't often because she's mostly a stay at home mom. She'll do a weekend day or two every now and then when her husband can stay at home with the kids. Have you ever heard of a per diem doctor? They may exist, but I haven't heard of them.

3) Nursing gives you the flexibility to change specialties if you want.

When you're a doctor, you are locked into your specialty by the residency you have completed. Some doctors complete longer dual-specialty residencies but still they're locked into their specialties. That can cause many problems and disappointments, such as what is the case with my own primary care doctor. He is an internist, but in India where he was born and raised, he was a surgeon. I interviewed him once and asked him what he liked about being an internal medicine practitioner and he wasted no time saying "I don't". He went on to explain that he'd rather be a surgeon, as he is at heart an artist and he finds surgery to be art... but when he came to America, he had to take a residency that was available and all he was able to get was internal medicine. (He's in his 60s, so I don't know how things worked when he came to America... which I imagine had to have been decades ago.) If you're a doctor in America and you decide that you don't like your specialty, the only way you can change specialties is to go through another residency or equivalent fellowship for the new specialty... and that takes years... and you will get paid only resident pay.

As a nurse, if you want to change specialties, it's fairly easy... all you have to do is get some training and some work experience. It's nowhere near as time-intensive as changing specialties as a doctor. Basically, if you're going to be a doctor, it strikes me that you'd better know, right now or at least somewhere in your third year of medical school, what type of doctor you will want to be for the rest of your life, no matter what. You don't have to make a decision quite that intense if you go into nursing.

4) Advanced-practice nurse pay can be pretty close to that of a doctor. (Heck, I've heard that in rare cases even an RN can make what a doctor makes by working enough hours!)

If you become an advanced practice nurse like an NP or CRNA, and you work the same number of hours that a doctor works, you will probably make the same money that a doctor makes... or darn close to it. I've investigated per-hour pay for these professions and they seem to be in the same ballpark. Everyone looks at the eye-popping salaries that doctors make and they compare NP pay unfavorably to that... but from what I've read, it seems that NPs don't generally work as many hours as doctors do. They probably can... but it seems like they're not forced to do so as much as doctors are.

5) The culture of medicine is said to be much more toxic than the culture of nursing.

Doctors have the highest rate of suicide of any profession. In my own observation, talking with nurses and wannabe nurses is much more pleasant than talking with doctors and wannabe doctors. In medicine there is a culture of hazing that is accepted and supported by a lot of the people, and it seems that that is nowhere near as prevalent in nursing. I read not long ago that the increased number of female medical students is having the effect of there being a movement to make medicine more human, like nursing. (Yup, that's what it said!)

So there you have it. I'm no authority on the subject, but this is what I have come up with in all of the research that I've done into both paths. Choose yours wisely.

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