Salary of Medical Doctors

It is a well documented fact that doctors have one of the highest paying professions in the United States. However, there are dozens of different kinds of doctors, each making a different salary amount, which can differ from the others; certain doctors can make far more than others, depending on what they specialize in. Although they do typically make a large sum of money, it is important to take into account the amount of school and training they went through to become doctors, not to mention the long hours they put in at the office or in the operating room.

Lowest Paid Doctors

Bringing up the low end in the doctor salary scale are those earning a yearly salary between $100,000 and $150,000. Dentists are some of the lowest paid doctors at around $119,000. Dentists specialize in the care of teeth and other mouth issues (such as the gum and tongue). Next in line are general pediatricians; these doctors work with children to young adults and will make around $121,000.

Family physicians typically have their own private practices (which are occasionally shared between one or two other family physicians) and can care for an entire family, from the children all the way up to the grandparents. These doctors bring in about $135,000. The last group of doctors in this salary range are doctors of internal medicine, who earn roughly $144,000. These doctors specialize on the inner workings of the body and generally diagnose problems individuals may be having with internal organs.

Middle Salary Range

Into the next salary range of doctors you will find only one kind of doctor: psychiatrists. These doctors make between $150,000 and $200,000 and are trained to understand the inner workings of the human mind, from what an individual may be thinking, to what is in their dreams, and even why they act a certain way. These doctor's can help diagnose any mental issues a patient might be having.

Highest Paid Doctors

This highest salary tier has two different types of doctors. The first is general surgeons. These doctors perform operations on patients who suffer from a wide range of issues. Most doctors specialize in only a specific area of the body, such as the heart (cardiac surgery) or the brain (neurosurgery). These doctors make roughly $212,000.

Anesthesiologists are in charge of issuing and measuring the correct amount of sedative to administer to a patient during surgery. The median salary of these doctors is about $253,000.

www.payscale.com/research/US/People_with_Doctor_of_Medicine_(MD)_Degrees/Salary