How much good does a doctor do? When people think of careers that make a difference, they tend to imagine jobs like teaching, social work and medicine. So, when we started 80,000 Hours, one of the first questions we asked was: how much good do these careers actually do? We started by making estimates of the impact you’d have by becoming a doctor who practices clinical medicine. The main purpose of doctors is to improve health, so we tried to estimate how much extra “health” a doctor adds. Working with a Cambridge public health researcher, Dr. Greg Lewis, we found that on average in the course
How much good does a doctor do? When people think of careers that make a difference, they tend to imagine jobs like teaching, social work and medicine. So, when we started 80,000 Hours, one of the first questions we asked was: how much good do these careers actually do? We started by making estimates of the impact you’d have by becoming a doctor who practices clinical medicine. The main purpose of doctors is to improve health, so we tried to estimate how much extra “health” a doctor adds. Working with a Cambridge public health researcher, Dr. Greg Lewis, we found that on average in the course of their career, a doctor in the UK will enable people to live an extra 120 years of healthy life, either by extending their lifespan or by improving their quality of health. There’s a huge amount of uncertainty in this figure, but it’s unlikely to be more than ten times higher. This research is due to be published and can be found in the footnotes.[17] Using a standard conversion rate (used by the World Bank among others) of 30 extra years of healthy life to one “life saved”, 120 years of healthy life is equivalent to four lives saved. There’s no doubting that this is a significant impact, however it’s less impact than many people expect doctors to have. There are three main reasons for this. It’s widely accepted by researchers that medicine has only increased average life expectancy by a few years. Most of the increase in life expectancy that’s occurred in the last 100 years is inst...
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