pharmD vs Nut

[Nutri-pharmD]

Hello,

I have to choose between to become Dietitian or pharmacist? I love both but I have to chose one. What' you thinks guy? pro vs con for each job

Thank you

 

Bonjour,

Je dois choisir entre étudier pour devenir nutritionniste- diététiste ou pharmacien? J'aime les deux mais je dois en choisir un programme. Qu'est-ce que vous pensez mec? pour et contre pour chaque emploi

Je vous remercie

 

[Egg_McMuffin]

I'll comment on dietetics:

Pros:

- it's super interesting and lots of practice settings to choose from (industry, food service, different areas of clinical, community, public health, private practice, etc.). Everyone has an opinion on nutrition, and there are lots of polarizing opinions out there- you get to be in the middle of it!

- Very holistic approach to pt care- you really get to have a good understanding of psychology and what drives behaviour change because knowledge dissemination is the easy part, behaviour change and working around personal barriers is the real challenge

- applicable to daily life- I apply the stuff I learned in dietetics to my own life, even though I no longer practice!

- Your colleagues are very very very passionate about what they do. They gotta be, because......

Cons:

- Job market is not as great as a lot of the other allied health professions, just because you need less RDs than other other professions at a given hospital, health unit, clinic, etc. schools are pumping out more grads than what the demand is for sure. I'd say pharmacy trumps in this area.

- It's a smaller profession, so in terms of lobbying/advocacy, we don't have a lot of say. Some secretary made a mistake typing in the salary grades for community RDs in Ontario 10 years ago and it STILL hasn't been fixed. So we have a bunch of RDs who work in community walking around getting paid less than your pharmacists, OTs, PTs, nurses, SWs etc....I get the sense that RDs are too nice and too diplomatic sometimes- maybe it's due to my next point...

- female dominated (there were like 3 dudes in my class of 150). I prefer more diversity and less passive-aggressive disagreements.

- We get paid less than pharmacists on the hour

- Unless you have to visit an RD at a community centre, family health team, or upon hospital admission, RD services aren't covered by OHIP. Private insurance coverage is variable. This really pisses me off. Lots of us do private practice (generally $100-$130/hr), but 80% can't sustain their livelihood just doing this full-time because the client base is not there.

- this is ultimately why I jumped ship: there's a ceiling in terms of career advancement as an RD (nursing's got the most amount of opportunities imo). Within clinical nutrition the highest level you can get is being a professional practice lead of the RDs. No one's stopping you from going up further but realize that because nutrition is such a niche field, you're probably going to have to leave nutrition to do something more general (and with more advanced degrees, of course).