Just stop romanticising doctors - pay them

There is a version of becoming a doctor that Pakistan loves to celebrate.

A student studies relentlessly, enters medical college, survives five years of examinations and clinical rotations, completes house job, and eventually builds a prestigious life. It is a chapter in the book of respect, but it is also incomplete. We have become reckless in romanticising medicine while remaining deaf to discussing what happens after the white coat is earned.

Medical education is often presented as a journey of idolisation, sacrifice and eventual stability. Social media adds another glorification: photographs in white coats, hospital corridors, graduation ceremonies and carefully curated stories of success.

But what happens after graduation? That is where the romance of medicine ends. For many young doctors, reality means long working hours, exhausting night duties, postgraduate training, emotional burnout, financial uncertainty, delayed salaries, inadequate facilities and concerns about personal safety. Recent reporting in The Express Tribune has documented unpaid stipends, excessive workloads and poor working conditions among young doctors.

Lately, I spoke to a doctor and content creator, Osama Idrees Khan, whose personal journey reflects some of these contradictions. Osama grew up with financial difficulties and a mother who was herself a heart patient. He describes his mother as the biggest influence on his life and recalls the sacrifices she made for his education. At one point, when the family could not afford his medical expenses, she sold jewellery to pay for his studies. For him, becoming a doctor was never simply about prestige. It was about changing the circumstances of his family. That dichotomy matters.

For someone from a financially comfortable household, medical school can be an exhausting academic journey. For someone from a struggling family, it can also represent the hope of economic mobility. The problem is that our system asks young people to make enormous sacrifices without guaranteeing stability afterwards.

Osama's house job coincided with one of the most painful periods of his life: the death of his mother. He describes that loss as a time when he felt he had lost his purpose. Yet medicine also became his purpose when purpose had abandoned him. His patients taught him gratitude when he himself was drowning in grief.

Here is compassion fatigue and a fundamental humanitarian deficit regarding the human behind the white coat. Doctors are not machines. We expect them to absorb death, grief, abuse, exhaustion and responsibility without allowing any of it to affect them. Then we are surprised when young doctors burn out.

Yes, medicine is noble. But nobility should not be weaponised against the very people it claims to serve.

A profession can be noble and still require fair compensation. A doctor can serve humanity and still deserve rest. A young doctor can care deeply about patients and still need financial security.

We also need to stop turning every doctor who criticises the system into an enemy of the profession. A doctor who says, "This system is exhausting," is not insulting medicine. A doctor who asks for better salaries is not greedy. A doctor who demands protection from violence is not asking for special treatment. And a doctor who considers working abroad is not necessarily unpatriotic. People do not leave systems overnight. They leave after years of accumulated frustration. If Pakistan wants its doctors to stay, it must give them reasons to stay.

Young doctors need timely compensation, safer hospitals, reasonable working conditions, protection from violence, career opportunities and meaningful professional safeguards.

There is also a class dimension we rarely discuss. A student whose parents can provide financial support throughout medical school experiences the profession differently from one who is simultaneously worried about household expenses, siblings and parents. This does not make one doctor harder-working than another. It means privilege determines how much financial vulnerability a person can tolerate.