Different Pay, Different Roles Posted on November 21, 2007 Joachim F. Hallmayer (bio) talks about the disparity in salary between MDs and PhDs.

You take a significant pay cut if you go as an MD into a non-medical profession. And certainly PhDs are less paid than MDs, and that's something which is not "just" always. And PhDs don't, they know this, and it is a thing of contention. We should not be saddened about the fact that there is a disparity, literally, in salaries.

I mean, as an M.D., before I even see a patient, usually you get 20 to 30 thousand dollars more; depending where you are, it’s even more. So there is this disparity in payments which plays a role in how the world is seen, and there’s absolutely no doubt about it.

Now, it’s not all money definitely, but there’s also the issues that usually PhDs are better-trained in methodologies and many of them are much, much better trained in statistics and much better trained in data analysis, data study design. And they have really focused because it’s, at one point in their life nearly all, to get a PhD you really have to focus on one area very, very narrowly. So part of it, what MDs have basically to acquire after their training they bring already with them, because otherwise you wouldn’t have a PhD.

So this leads often I think to misunderstandings on both sides. I mean, first of all, the MDs usually can be very dismissive of PhDs, but it can also go the opposite way. But there is absolutely no doubt that there needs to be, I think, better understanding of the roles which each one of them has to fulfill within a project or within the collaboration.

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