There was a time when becoming a physician meant entering a profession in which your experience was not merely appreciated; it was actively sought after. My father belongs to a generation that remembers this world. He once told me about the difficult decision he faced: whether to continue as chief of staff at a primary health care center or leave and establish his own practice. The difficulty was not finding a job. It was deciding which opportunity to accept. That world seems almost unimaginable today.

The medical profession has changed dramatically. Universities have produced more physicians, health care systems have become increasingly bureaucratic, and medicine has gradually been transformed from a profession built around individual expertise into something increasingly resembling a labor market governed by numbers, budgets, and standardized metrics. Perhaps the world did overproduce physicians. Perhaps we are beginning to see the consequences of that. The same phenomenon can be seen among PhDs and other highly educated professionals. When supply increases faster than meaningful opportunities, qualifications that once distinguished a person begin to lose some of their value.

But there is something profoundly dangerous about applying the logic of supply and demand too mechanically to medicine. A physician is not simply a unit of labor. Medicine is cumulative. Clinical experience matters. Every patient encountered, every difficult diagnosis considered, every complication managed, and every mistake learned from contributes to professional judgment. Experience is not simply another line on a CV. It is part of the safety system of health care.

And yet we increasingly seem to treat experience with suspicion. A physician with years of clinical work, academic achievements, and experience from several health care settings may apply for a position and find themselves questioned not about what they can contribute, but about why they have changed workplaces. “Why have you moved so many times?” It is a strange question when viewed from another perspective.

Perhaps the physician has worked in different environments because they wanted to learn. Perhaps they have experienced different health care systems, patient populations, and organizational cultures. Perhaps they have been searching for a workplace where they can develop professionally and provide good care. Instead of seeing this breadth as an asset, employers may interpret it as instability.

We have created an experience paradox: We demand experience, but sometimes punish the very career mobility through which experience is acquired. There is an even deeper problem here. If we start believing that a younger, cheaper, and more easily replaceable physician is always preferable to a more experienced colleague, we risk confusing efficiency with quality.

Of course, health care must be economically sustainable. Nobody is arguing that experience should give physicians an unlimited entitlement to employment or that every senior physician is necessarily better than every younger one. But medicine is not a factory producing identical products. A decade of clinical experience cannot simply be exchanged for a lower salary on a spreadsheet. Expertise has a value that may not be immediately visible in an accounting system. It appears when a physician recognizes a dangerous pattern early, asks the extra question, notices that something does not fit, or knows when a seemingly ordinary case is becoming something else. That is where experience becomes safety.

And safety is not an abstract concept. It is the foundation upon which a functioning society depends. We should therefore be careful about allowing the increasing supply of physicians to undermine the value we place on physicians themselves. The answer cannot simply be to produce fewer doctors. Nor can it be to return nostalgically to a health care system where physicians were automatically guaranteed professional status and opportunity. The real challenge is to build a system that can distinguish between quantity and capacity.

Having more physicians can be enormously beneficial if society uses that capacity to improve access, reduce waiting times, strengthen primary care, expand research, and provide better continuity of care. But if more physicians simply means greater competition for fewer meaningful positions, then we risk creating a profession in which highly educated people spend increasing amounts of their careers trying to prove that they deserve to practice what they have already spent years mastering. That is not progress.

We should also reconsider what we mean by success in medicine. Success should not be measured solely by productivity, the number of consultations completed, or how cheaply a physician can be employed. A successful health care system should be measured by whether patients receive appropriate care, whether physicians can develop professionally, whether knowledge is transferred between generations, and whether mistakes are prevented before they become tragedies. Experience should be one of the pillars of that system.

There is an old principle that should not become outdated simply because the labor market has changed: Experience brings success. Success maintains safety. And safety creates the conditions in which society can prosper. We should not abandon that principle simply because there are now more physicians competing for fewer positions. Medicine may have become a numbers game.

It must not become a game in which the numbers matter more than the people behind them, or the patients who ultimately depend on them.

Paul Dranichnikov is a physician in Sweden.