Physician Turned Lawyer - Switch to the Dark Side?
The most frequent question I am asked, in almost every context of my life, is "Why did you change from practicing medicine to practicing law?" Of course, I have an answer to that question that I can recite in my sleep, and depending on my mood, who's asking and how verbose I'm feeling, it varies from simply, "I wanted to combine the two disciplines" to a much longer (and undoubtedly very boring) history of my life and feelings at the time I decided to make the switch.
The truth is that I get great satisfaction in drawing on my medical background in my legal practice. In peer review matters, I understand the clinical issues better than my non-clinicial attorney colleagues. In EMTALA cases, I love putting the medical records next to the confusing regulations and advocating for the client in a way that a non-physician-attorney could only dream of. Even in drafting ordinary hospital-physician business contracts, my understanding of what it means to be on-call and/or to provide medical director services and/or to provide professional services from the physician's perspective adds great value to the services I provide both my physician and hospital clients.
Still, my clients are sometimes leary and make half-serious jokes about my "defection" to the "dark side." There seem to be only two vocations where, if you decide, for whatever reason, not to continue in that vocation, people just don't quite get it: one is being a physician, the other, a priest. Those two paths are often deemed "callings" rather than "careers."
I'd like to put a plug in for the law as being just as noble a vocation as medicine or the priesthood. As a healthcare attorney, I strive to help my clients to provide the best patient care possible by ensuring that they are doing their best to comply with the law and are as minimally distracted by government scrutiny as possible. If my clients think the laws are not conducive to high quality care, I help them to find a way to change the law.
So, for now at least, I will try to keep answering politely whenever I'm asked why I made the switch.
