Obsessed With Looking Good: Dermatology and Plastic Surgery Are the Most Competitive Medical Fields
Photo by AJC1
I wasn’t exactly shocked to read in the New York Times that two medical specialties concerned with physical appearance — dermatology and plastic surgery — are among the most competitive ones.
It completely makes sense that medical students would flock to those fields if “you can spend an hour with a patient treating them for diabetes and make $100, or you can do Botox and make $2,000 in the same time”. And while an internist earns an average of $191,525, a dermatologist earns an average of $390,274.
According to the article, the result is that America has a shortage of primary-care physicians. And although I assume that eventually, market forces will correct that by starting to pay internists more (after all, it’s all about supply and demand), these corrections can take years, during which access to basic medical care could suffer.
It also turns out that we are becoming ever more obsessed with our looks: plastic surgeons and dermatologists in the United States performed about 9.6 million non-surgical treatments such as Botox, fat injections and lasers in 2007, almost nine times the number a decade earlier.
There is, of course, a price to pay, as individuals and as a society, for living in a looks-obsessed world. On the societal level, the first question that comes to mind: as more and more talent goes into dermatology and plastic surgery, what will happen to the fields of, say, oncology and neurology?
On an individual level, I recently came across several disturbing examples of the personal consequences to the pressure to “look good”:
A highly intelligent woman feels “unloved and disrespected” because she is not good-looking.
A porn-ish website raises donations for women who want breast implants but can’t afford them. Alexa rank for the website is 50,000 so it can’t be doing too poorly.
A young, talented, accomplished writer battles with worries about aging and looking older as she enters her thirties.
A young woman who recovered from an eating disorder wonders if she will ever feel “normal” again.
And my “favorite”: Botox could kill you.
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Jen responds:
Posted: March 22nd, 2008 at 11:30 am →
“unloved and disrespected” because she is not good-looking.”
That letter made me so sad. It made me realize that for me too, being happy with the way I look plays a big part in how I feel about myself in general.
ironman responds:
Posted: March 22nd, 2008 at 4:42 pm →
$191,525 doesn’t sound too bad to me.
But I see your point.
Google Search Terms: The Funny, The Sad, And The CREEPY | MomGrind responds:
Posted: August 3rd, 2008 at 1:24 pm →
[…] “Obsessed about my looks” Where they ended up: Obsessed with Looking Good […]