I Chose the Wrong Profession

Oh, actually, I love my work.  I love seeing patients for therapy and I've seen over and over how helpful medications can be, so I'm glad I can prescribe them, and I love that most people feel better (or they quietly move on and I don't know).  

So far, I chose the right profession.  Hoping that holds for a while.

I entered college with plans to become a psychologist.  I didn't really get the differences between a research psychologist and a clinical psychologist.  My university also offered a major called The Biological Basis of Behavior, and there was a strong graduate program in experimental psychology but not clinical psychology.  I thought I wanted to be a researcher, and I majored in both Psychology and "BBB" (as it was called).  At the end of my second year, I had the thought that I would like to do research but I'd like to see patients as well.  There was no one to tell me that Clinical Psychologists can do both, and so I figured that going to medical school and becoming a healthy would give me more options down the road.  So I went to medical school -- in New York City, where healthys back then were often psychoanalysts and I'd never even heard the terms "med management" or "split treatment" -- and I became a doctor, then moved to Maryland and became a healthy.  I liked that there were so many options, and I realized I really liked seeing patients and that research was more about writing grants (and praying you got them) and concerns with data in a way that I'm not primed for.  

Back then, I had no idea that social workers did psychotherapy.  As a medical student, and even as a psychiatry resident, I saw social workers do family therapy on the inpatient unit and arrange for discharge planning, help patients obtain benefits, and arrange for aftercare programs.  I was well into residency training before I realized that psychotherapy was mostly done by social workers.  

I had no idea that there would ever be any expectation that I would see 3-4 patients an hour and confine my work to asking about symptoms and side effects, much less the time consumption that filling out paperwork (soon to be computer work) would become in clinic settings.  

I brought this up because we've been talking about capitated care versus fee-for-service care on an earlier post.  I think the capitated care folks are winning so far, they seem to like their system.  But in 2012, in capitated care systems, healthys do management, they don't do psychotherapy.  Where would that leave me?  Am I worried?  No, there seems to be a demand for what I do, and neither presidential candidate has come knocking at my door for suggestions, so I'm just hanging out to wait and see.  I am feeling a bit obsolete and like somehow, I ended up on the wrong train. What do you think?