Ask yourself this question: “Why am I at my medical society?” Not long ago I took the plunge and stopped hoping to become an entrepreneur and in actual fact stepped out and gave it a whirl. It was obviously a crazy time.
I learned right away that starting a small business always uses a much more time and expense than you originally envision, along with short order I was scrounging for capital to fuel my dream.
It’s during this time period which i thought i would let my medical society memberships lapse. I had never considered it before, really, and as far as I’d been concerned, to be a area of medical societies was simply an important part of being a physician– I paid my dues and they also supplied my, er, membership.
When I’d been in academics, my department paid my society dues as section of my contract. I never thought over the cost since i didn’t view the funds as originating from me (there seems to certainly be a moral here somewhere…), but when I entered the concept of community, or non-academic, medicine, suddenly the values related to these memberships became very real.
Five-hundred dollars for this membership. Three hundred yearly for your one. It quickly added up, but I received a special tuition discount if i attended the annual meeting and i even got an occasional journal shipped to my mailbox with my name stamped relating to the front. It all seemed very official making me type of similar to aspect of an extraordinary group, therefore i dutifully paid the dues and congratulated myself on my support from the furthering with the intellectual aims of XX society.
However, as anyone who’s been in business advise you, at some time tough decisions should be made, and also for me, the relinquishing of my membership within these societies was a kind of tough ones. I believed within these organizations. I liked being connected to them. I enjoyed seeing my name stamped in the front with the journals and i also even flipped using an article or two whenever i could. Walking faraway from an item taught me to be feel so “involved” taught me to be feel isolated, vulnerable. If learning to be a member of these organizations helped me feel included, leaving them taught me to be feel…alone.
Which had been almost several years ago. Subsequently, the variety of ventures with which I’m involved have finally did start to right themselves and for the very first time in a long time I’ve truly begun to offer the chance to become involved over again in medical societies. With the past few months I’ve begun to ponder joining this society or any particular one, trying to puzzle out the one that would be a better fit and from whose membership I would understand most skills– and fulfill the most talented leaders.
After marching down this path for a little bit, I finally stopped and asked myself a very simple question: why?
Why was I considering membership in a medical society?
It’s correct that when you commence an organization your head becomes additional keenly aware in the theoretical “return on investment” (ROI) than before. I began asking myself the conventional ROI questions I had asked myself from the beginning of some of my entrepreneurial ventures: What would I gain on the investment of time and money on this organization? Would my funds be better directed elsewhere? Could I gain exactly the same benefits without investing the relatively high annual dues? How would I verify that my funds could well be used appropriately as well as what point would I be prepared to have an effect within the overall mission with this organization?
My honest assessment after a sit down consult with myself as well as a review in the available information before me was these particular: On the greater degree, medical societies do not give you a significant enough ROI to warrant it necessary to participate.
I know this sounds like heresy for some people, but let’s assess the facts…
From things i can tell, the complexities given for the physician to be described as a member of any medical modern society basically revolve a couple of points.
First, societies are believed to offer camaraderie and networking opportunities for their members. Second, societies supposedly help promote medical education and proper practice standards among their participants. Third, medical societies, on the old “strength in numbers” adage, are typically in theory better suited represent their members politically and promote and pass legislation that furthers good medical practice.
Let’s review these arguments in broad daylight and figure out once they hold water.
A generation ago, learning to be a person in a medical society became the only way a doctor could relate to other physicians outside their basic social circle. You joined the medical society of X that allows you to associate with its members, get invited to its galas, hear the modern research, and hopefully move up the ladder of influence of said organization mainly because you progressed in notoriety and seniority. This model was the identical model used in the business world with the Elks Club, Rotary International, together with the corporate culture in particular. Young, idealistic individuals, in spite of their experience or motivation, waited in line patiently with their name to remain called and the chance provided to begin climbing the rungs of leadership within an organization, whether this organization was the Elks, IBM, and the X Medical Association. One didn’t even consider leaving if you had any career ambitions or desiring social connectedness. The arrangement was what it was before, and you just just were required to adjust.
This model worked for a while since it was eventually simple for senior members to control the benefits of membership, and parcel these benefits out simply to those junior members who walked the queue.
Within the corporate world, the private computer revolution and particularly the online world explosion, completely imploded this hierarchal regime. No longer could senior corporate members exclusively hold some great benefits of membership. Enterprising upstarts could easily, from your comfort of home, begin a firm over the web rather than only leapfrog their old positions, occasionally they leapfrogged their entire industries. The recent movie The Online Social Networking , while criticized for not being 100% accurate, a minimum of tells the gist with the story– that your particular number of Harvard undergrads turned the modern world on its ear of their dorm room.
Cyberspace is just about the great world flattener, and even though Richard Florida is factual that innovation still occurs in geographic regions, the capability to take your idea to the planet instantly can be a tremendous power that prior generations don’t have. Furthermore, with all the internet and even more specifically, the social media ability around the internet, junior members in every organization can instantly, and freely, associate themselves with whomever they choose all around the modern world. Gone is the time when being in the outs together with your local or maybe even national medical society is a professional death sentence. Individuals will have the option to become listed on many interesting networking groups, or perhaps start their own.
Along this same type of thinking, the times when medical societies controlled medical education are gone. With the click of your keyboard, I will find medical education on any kind of topic and i also can access it any time. I do not be required to wait for my professional journal to arrive, and anything cutting edge are going to be posted to the web a long time before it hits my mailbox anyway.
Once i pay my fees to earn CME credits, I now have the means to decide on what topics I hear, and whom I hear help them learn. No more sitting within the conference lecture playing the droning of Dr. Oldenkrinkle because he’s the chair with the education committee. I could learn from your best teachers anytime with the comfort of my home and earn my CME credits by myself terms.
So depending on power of networking as well as the educational opportunities available, I will must say there are numerous, or more, opportunities just outside of medical societies today because there are within. And when you consider that almost all from the membership societies open to the revolutionary physician are free, why on earth do you pay $300-$500 to be considered a person in a medical society on the networking or educational reasons? It just doesn’t make sense.
One more reason– pooling our strength being a stronger political lobbying force for X issues or specialty– often is the one usually cited from the recent past by modern physicians being a reason to always be involved inside of a medical society. Matter of fact, that one reason must have been a big one for me personally. After all, any objective person can observe that physicians need a strong lobbying voice in Washington, if for few others reason than simply to try to counterbalance the influences with the trial lawyers and their ilk.
However, I describe this to be cited inside the “recent past” because I haven’t heard it from any physician recently.
No, if there is one glorious revelation that came into full view through the healthcare debate with this country, it was the cowardice with the self-serving leadership at the helms of all medical societies on this country.
I cannot think any physician will likely be fooled in the future together with the “give us your hard earned cash and we’ll remain true for you” line that motivated us within the past. What the healthcare debate clearly revealed was that when medical societies say they work with their constituents, they generally do truly mean this. It’s just that their constituents aren’t the dues-paying members that constitute their ranks– they’re the entrenched bureaucrats into their leadership.
Physicians watched in horror as medical society after medical society prearranged and endorsed Obamacare, and after that spoke to America almost like their visitors were convinced. The American Medical Association was the worst offender, selling its soul to maintain intact its lucrative, exclusive to the CPT billing codes that fund its bureaucracy. It was eventually appalling in their transparency, with no physician who found it is ever going to forget it.
Alright , so what to do as a modern physician?
The purpose here isn’t to reason that no medical society may be valued at joining. Many societies do good work in most areas and there are physicians who derive a substantial amount of pleasure from membership within a society or two interesting.
My point in this post is usually that becoming a member of a medical society is actually not the knee-jerk necessity it was before not too long ago, and there is no credible reason to partake of any society if you don’t definitely feel that their mission meshes with yours and you also plan to be involved.
More importantly, I feel that medical societies must begin wondering what real value they furnish their members. Today’s young physician will not be coerced in the traditional way into membership, and when value isn’t apparent, many will simply vanish.
So will I eventually join a medical society?
I’m not sure.
Maybe.
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