EA - Careers in medicine - a new path profile from Probably Good and High Impact Medicine by Probably Good

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Careers in medicine - a new path profile from Probably Good and High Impact Medicine, published by Probably Good on October 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The teams at Probably Good and High Impact Medicine (Hi-Med) are excited to co-publish a new path profile on careers in medicine! You can find the profile over at both the Probably Good and Hi-Med websites. Summary The path profile is an introductory guide to impactful careers within the medical space, primarily aimed at existing doctors and medical students who may not yet be familiar with EA principles. One goal for this profile is to provide actionable advice for people who may be more resistant to wholesale career changes. We understand that large career changes can be daunting, especially for people who have spent many years aspiring (and training) to become a doctor. With this in mind, we want to give information for people who may be strongly inclined towards a career in clinical medicine, and want to find ways to increase their impact. The article suggests ways in which medics might increase their impact within clinical careers – for example, by pursuing high-paying specialities and donating to effective charities – as well as pointing out where doctors may be able to get involved with high-impact activities alongside their clinical duties. However, the profile also makes clear that the highest impact choices for many people will likely lie outside clinical work, and we therefore highlight a few of the most salient high-impact alternatives both in the medical field more broadly, as well as outside medicine, for someone with a medical background. The career paths we discuss include medical research, public health, biosecurity, and nonprofit entrepreneurship. Below, we’ve included the full introduction to the profile as well as a couple of representative excerpts. Introduction The medical profession attracts huge numbers of altruistically-minded people who want to make a difference with their careers. One recent survey, which asked for the career aspirations of over 600,000 teenagers across the world, found that over 10% of them wanted to become doctors. This is great – doctors are vital, and the world is much better because of them. But if you’ve gone through medical school, you’ll be familiar with the concept of triage – that is, treating patients according to the urgency of their needs and your ability to help. Sometimes this means making tough calls about who to help first and how to help them. Though triage can be emotionally challenging, it’s vital for saving lives. We think it’s possible to apply a kind of triage to the world’s problems – working out which are most urgent and deciding on the most effective ways to solve them. In doing so, we may be able to identify career choices that allow us to achieve even more good than we might do otherwise. This kind of career-focused triage can be applied here in two ways. First, we can look for the highest priority paths within clinical medicine, by searching for where doctors are most needed, and what they can do to help most. Secondly, we can look at alternatives to conventional clinical careers to see if we can have more impact on the world through another career route. Perhaps surprisingly, it turns out that there are a number of career paths in which you might be able to do more good than you would as a doctor, either because these paths focus on more pressing problems, or provide larger-scale solutions than treating patients individually. In this profile, we'll highlight a few of these possible high-impact career routes – including biosecurity, nonprofit entrepreneurship, medical research, and public health. If one or more of these options could be a good fit for you, then you could have multiple times the impact in these careers than you might...