[avavavava]

At the beginning of my independent career, I will have spent:

- 4 years in college (BA)
- 2 years in medical school
- 5 years in graduate school (PhD)
- 2 more years of medical school (MD)
- 3 years in residency
- 3 years in fellowship
... so 19 years in total... about 80'000+ hours, with probably about 50-55'000 of those hours on medicine alone... and that doesn't include studying after hours.

I will be 37 years old when I START a totally independent job.

It's a long road.

I just know enough at this point, to know where my limits are... and it took me a decade to get there. What I do know is that NOTHING replaces experience. There is a lot of really incorrect information being passed around on the internet (and quite a bit of it has been through these forums), and some of the time, people armed with internet printouts can be a doctor's nightmare. There are lots of individual accounts of the sort "I went to doctors for x years with y, but none of them did anything or understood what it is until I went to z site of the internet... therefore all doctors are stupid, unnecessary, and people should treat themselves".

I really hope, that after 19 years, I'm going to be more useful to my patients than an iPhone app.