My take is a little different. Yes a lot of doctoring is paperwork and some of it makes **** all sense but most is actually pretty important; when you're trying to co-ordinate so many different specialists you need to have good communication. You save far more lives signing off on some anti-clot medication than you do performing CPR or something. Its a part of 'saving lives'.
But that should perhaps tell you that what we mean by 'saving lives' is a little different to the public's perception. Its rare that you get a person coming in who needs instantaneous life-saving treatment and then they get completely better and live many years. The vast majority of cases are confused demented old people who have multiple things wrong with them. You might 'save' them, but actually they'll be back next month with the same thing - its life
extension not 'saving', and their quality of life drops with every passing year. For many others you fix them up a little and then realise their current living situation is that they're incontinent and living in their own excrement, haven't showered in months and are severely malnourished as they can't use the kitchen any more, yet somehow they're insisting on going home and not to a care home/sheltered facility. If they can be convinced organising that can take months. The hospital gets clogged up with dozens of these cases then can't take new actually sick patients from A&E and ambulances end up queued outside the hospital and you get stories like
this. Maybe in the meantime the patient picks up a pneumonia or rolls out of bed and breaks a hip and dies because of their general frailty, and the family kick off at you as they think its your fault. Or then you've got your crazy patients who come into A&E every 3 days with nothing wrong with them at all but you have no choice but to treat each presentation as if it might be real.
And then you have to remember that in a modern setup, whilst it may feel like you're alone and over-worked, actually there are a lot of people looking over your shoulder: nurses, seniors, the daily ward round... what you actually did would have been done by someone else in the vast majority of cases. Especially if you consider that if you hadn't got into med school, someone else would have taken your place. Are you definitely doing a better job than whoever they would have been? I don't think you can ever claim you
extended someone's life until you can say that you caught something someone else in your position, nor anyone else in the team, would not have caught.
Its an important job. Even the paperwork. However, you rarely 'save' lives. Your one part of a machine that works to slightly extend them.