Medicine is a pretty high stakes career. You mess up and people can die. In radiology, we are expected to be near perfect (not miss important findings however s

Medicine is a pretty high stakes career. You mess up and people can die. In radiology, we are expected to be near perfect (not miss important findings however subtle they might be) and make the right calls. This is difficult to do even with the training we have had. Part of it is just dealing with uncertainties. Did I make the right calls? Did I miss something subtle but important that might harm the patient - such as a subtle small nodule that 2 years later can become metastatic cancer? If so, am I going to get sued? You do that with every case, none which pay well at all. Medicare is the largest insurer in America and they pay around 4-5$ for a chest x ray or a wrist x ray or whatever joint x ray. A CT be it a cancer staging ct or trauma ct is valued at 40$. It can take a while to read if you really do your due diligence…meaning you compare to the past CTs to see how things have progressed, read history, take your time looking at the images. So it should take half an hour to read. Often times the prior imaging and clinical history isn’t even available. And if you work at big academic centers you are forced to read quickly. No physicians want to do a bad job but we are just cogs in wheels in the medical industry complex.