Pauline Chen’s latest column is food for thought. Lots of people resent doctors who drive around in BMWs or live in large houses — why should they get to charge so much when people need their services?

Although I often disagree with Dr. Chen’s policy views, her column this week eloquently illustrates one of the reasons doctors deserve to be paid well: They risk a lot more than most of us do.

Does your job put you at risk for swine flu? For hepatitis? For HIV? A doctor’s job does. He is constantly around sick people, examining them close-up, often taking samples of their bodily fluids, using needles and countless other instruments that could put the doctor at risk of contamination. Even if a doctor manages to get through his career without contracting a serious illness from one of his patients, he has to deal with the added psychological stress that taking such a risk entails.

Dr. Chen describes the first time she stuck herself with a needle that had just been used on an infected patient: “And for a moment, I felt the floor beneath my feet give way, pulling everything — Jean, my heart, my work, my life — down with it.” She further goes on to say that the feeling never goes away, no matter how many times she has come through another potential contamination unscathed.

Is a doctor supposed to go through this kind of psychological stress (never mind the stress of four years of medical school and additional years of postgraduate residency training) out of brother-love alone? If we expect doctors to do work that is not only highly skilled, but also psychologically stressful, for low pay just because patients need them, we shouldn’t be surprised to find that fewer and fewer people want to be doctors. The fact that we need doctors — and that we, as patients, put them through so much — is precisely why we should be paying them well.

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