When I started earning a real income as a surgeon, I was thirty-two years old and financially illiterate. Nobody had taught me anything about money. Not medical school. Not my mentors. Not the hospital. Not the senior surgeons I admired.
I knew how to stop bleeding. I did not know how compound interest worked.
That personal anecdote is not the point. The point is that it is not personal at all. It is structural.
Like many young physicians, I entered adult life late. While friends from business schools were already buying apartments, understanding taxes, building investments, and negotiating contracts, we were still operating through the hierarchy of training programs, night calls, exams, fellowships, and operating rooms. Medicine gave us technical competence. Almost no economic literacy.
And because physicians are generally intelligent, disciplined, and high earners, the world assumes they understand finance naturally. Most do not.
What many young doctors discover too late is that medicine creates a strange paradox. You can earn a high income and still remain economically vulnerable.
For years, the assumption is that surgical skill alone protects you. That competence naturally leads to stability. That if you work hard enough, the rest organizes itself. It does not.
Modern medicine trains physicians to manage biological risk. It barely prepares them to manage economic risk. That mattered less thirty years ago. It matters enormously today.
Health care systems are changing. Younger physicians increasingly enter large organizations, private equity-backed groups, hospital networks, or corporate structures where contracts, incentives, productivity targets, and negotiation asymmetries shape daily professional life. Many physicians understand anatomy better than the agreements governing their own work. That is not a personal failure. It is a structural blind spot in medical education.
We spend more than a decade learning physiology, pathology, surgical technique, and patient safety. Almost nobody teaches us how to read a partnership agreement, evaluate debt, understand taxes, negotiate compensation structures, or think about long-term financial independence.
So young physicians do what most intelligent but inexperienced professionals do. They delegate. To bankers. To accountants. To advisors. To institutions. Sometimes that works well. Sometimes it does not.
The problem is not that financial professionals are malicious. The problem is that their incentives are not always aligned with ours. Physicians are often excellent clients: high income, little time, low financial education, deep trust in institutional authority. Many discover this only after a divorce, burnout, illness, partnership conflict, malpractice crisis, or sudden inability to work. That moment can be brutal.
Because medicine quietly encourages another dangerous illusion: the belief that a high income equals security. It does not.
A physician whose entire life depends on uninterrupted clinical productivity is not truly secure. Surgery is physically demanding. Clinical reimbursement changes. Organizations renegotiate. Health care consolidates. Markets evolve. Bodies age. Priorities shift.
Many doctors discover, in their forties or fifties, that they did not build independent wealth. They built dependence on their own ability to continue working at full intensity. This is particularly dangerous for surgeons, whose income often depends directly on procedural volume, physical stamina, and constant performance.
Financial literacy is therefore not about greed. It is not about luxury. It is not about becoming obsessed with money. It is about autonomy. Professional autonomy. Intellectual autonomy. The ability to say no. The ability to reduce hours when necessary. The ability to leave a toxic environment. The ability to make clinical decisions without economic panic in the background.
Ironically, medicine discusses physician wellness constantly while avoiding many of the structural economic realities that silently drive physician stress. Burnout is not always exhaustion. Sometimes it is trapped dependency. A physician who cannot slow down because everything collapses financially is not free, regardless of income level.
I do not believe medical schools should turn physicians into financiers. But we systematically underestimate how economically unprepared many young doctors are when they enter modern health care systems. The result is a generation of highly trained professionals who understand complex biology yet often remain vulnerable inside the economic structures surrounding medicine itself. That vulnerability deserves more attention than it currently receives.
The future of medicine will not only depend on clinical excellence. It will also depend on whether physicians retain enough economic understanding to preserve their independence inside increasingly financialized health care systems.
Medical school taught me how to save lives. I wish someone had also taught me how to protect my own.
David Schiettecatte is a plastic surgeon.
