Becoming a doctor in the US from UK medical school

If you search through the forum there have been lots of threads on this.

I’m curious about what is so appealing about working in the us system?

afaik you can't work as a doctor in the US without doing a doctoral degree and becoming a MD or DO.

I just wanna know how do I become a doctor in the US as I am currently in a UK medical school. I’ve lived in the UK for the majority of my life but I’ve always wanted to work in the US healthcare system.
Could someone outline the process or give me any resources please?

You would need to take the USMLE exams, and then apply through the national residency matching program. You probably would need to get your medical degree validated by an external agency too.

Note that as an IMG you will be extremely limited in the areas and specialties you could apply to and have any chance of being accepted. Realistically you would only be able to get into undersubscribed specialties like family medicine (GP basically) or psychiatry in areas that receive few applications (mostly rural areas). You would not be successful applying to any programmes in major cities or competitive specialties like surgery, radiology, urology, or even things like internal medicine specialties in most places.

Part of this is tied to visa requirements where to be sponsored for a working visa, the sponsor needs to prove there are no suitably qualified American applicants for the job. For any competitive specialties or desirable locations this will never be the case. Even if you were a US citizen but we're an IMG you would likely still struggle because residency programs just don't really seem to like taking IMGs if they can help it.

Also I'm not really sure why you would want to work in the US healthcare sector anyway. If it's because you have giant dollar signs flashing up in your eyes you can dispel this notion altogether. For starters US doctors have huge malpractice indemnity premiums, and frankly being an IMG yours might even be higher. Also the way the only way those "average" (mean) salaries are representative is if you are running your own practice. If you are working for someone else's practice or in a hospital you would be making much closer to what UK medics earn. Additionally the mechanism through which you would earn that money seems rather ethically questionable - which is charging extremely high amounts of money for healthcare to patients and getting the money for their treatment from their medical insurance (plus any co-pay the patient had to pay themselves upfront). The US system forces the costs of the care onto the patient directly and individually which is why many patients simply can't seek treatment because they can't afford it. This is why people die from preventable causes there, or have to ration their insulin (often dying in the process) if they're diabetic etc.

So unless you have no morals and want to work in family medicine in rural wyoming while not earning that much more than in the UK anyway when all costs are factored in I can't see what the appeal is. If you think you are going to be living on the west or east coast making megabucks as a surgeon or something then you need to manage your expectations becuase there is 0 chance of that happening as an IMG.

Thank you for the help- everyone!

There seems to be an underlying idea that I wish to only travel to the US for financial reasons. Whilst the $$$ would be an added bonus, if I wanted money I wouldn't have chosen medicine (there are better ways to gain money).
If you must know I wanted to be around the best doctors in the world which my presumption was they would mainy gravitate towards the US from around the world. Whilst this may be partially true there are other countries such as those in Europe (and the UK) and Japan which can inspire me as well.

Thank you for the help- everyone!

There seems to be an underlying idea that I wish to only travel to the US for financial reasons. Whilst the $$$ would be an added bonus, if I wanted money I wouldn't have chosen medicine (there are better ways to gain money).
If you must know I wanted to be around the best doctors in the world which my presumption was they would mainy gravitate towards the US from around the world. Whilst this may be partially true there are other countries such as those in Europe (and the UK) and Japan which can inspire me as well.

If you must know I wanted to be around the best doctors in the world which my presumption was they would mainy gravitate towards the US from around the world.