Each year we are given a huge amount of information in the Medscape Physician Compensation Report. If you are not familiar with this yearly report, it is a compilation of over 20,000 physicians in 29 specialties that includes information such as salary and hours worked.

There is a lot to digest here, so I reviewed it, digested it, and this is what came out.

If I were to sum up this year’s Medscape Physician Compensation Report 2018 into two sentences, it would be this:

To make the most money as a physician, you need to be a white male specializing in plastic surgery in a private practice located in North Dakota.

To make the least amount of money you need to be an African American female employed as a primary care doctor (public health and preventative medicine if you never hope to pay off your student loans) working in Washington DC.

To further help you understand the Medscape report, I have more digested goodies to pass on. Above is my latest version of my Physician Specialty Pain Scale which is based off of data from the latest Medscape Physician Compensation Report.

In the past I used data from the “Overall career satisfaction” page but that was not included in this year’s report so this year’s Physician Pain Scale uses data from the “I would choose the same specialty” results found in the report.

From the physicians that responded, orthopedists, plastic surgeons, and radiologists led all physicians in “re-choosing” their specialty.

At the bottom of the pack for “re-choosing” the same specialty are rheumatology, public health/preventative medicine, and nephrology.

Overall, I was pleased to see that 77% of physicians polled would choose to do medicine all over again. It was just sad to see that almost half of all nephrologist would not go back into nephrology if they had the chance to do it over. What’s wrong with nephrology?

See the report for yourself here.