Should i go to medical school or get masters degree in medical physics here in the philippines?

Having actually had some experience in both medical physics and medicine, here's my input on the matter:

1- Medical school leads to more prestige and more money overall than medical physics. Salary is a lot higher, there's a certain status to being a doctor, and so forth.

2- There's potentially more options open to you with a medical degree. Medical physics leads basically to medical physics, or possibly academia or industry. Medicine covers a wide array of specialties.

3- On the downside for medicine, though, it's a LOT more work. Hours in medicine are crazily long, 80 hours a week is not unusual, night shifts, all that. Medical physicists aren't lazy by any means, but they aren't subject to the same pressure as doctors are. From my experience, they usually had a lot more time on their hands, what would count as long hours to them would be normal by doctor standards, and so forth. As a doctor, there's something of an expectation that you sacrifice a lot of your life to medicine, whereas with medical physics, that's not really the case.

4- If you're doing physics, you are smart enough to do either. I'd say that physics contains harder concepts than medicine (differential equations, and all that), but medicine generally requires you to know more- e.g. in medicine you can be quizzed on random crap you learned in a footnote from a lecture 2 years ago and be expected to know it backwards, whereas medical physics, the same "volume" of content isn't there.

5- There is a greater human challenge working in med vs med phys. You will see people get very sick as a doctor, you will see people die, you'll be covered in blood, you'll have people crying because they're going to die, and more. In medical physics, it's largely focused on the technology and the machines, so you aren't as directly exposed to that side of things.

6- I would generally rate the atmosphere in medical physics to be a little friendlier than in medicine. All workplaces have their issues, but I found that the medical physicists were, on average, a bit more laid-back and welcoming. Medicine can be very competitive, there are huge levels of politics, different specialties fight, and so forth. Medical physics is by no means immune to workplace politics, but it wasn't as brutal either- at least in my experience.

7- In terms of the job market, I can't tell you what the story is in the Phillipines. There's generally always jobs for doctors, although some specialties are very competitive and there aren't always jobs in the fields you want.

So that's what I can tell you about those. For what it's worth- and this is just me- I went from medical physics to medicine, and there were many times I regretted that decision. On the other hand, there were many great things about making the transition as well. I ended up using my medical physics knowledge and skills in a slightly unusual way. I basically ended up doing stuff with population health rather than doing direct clinical practice- so I do things like statistics, trends in diseases, how the health system works, tracing outbreaks, and so forth. A lot of the skills for that came from physics, particularly the numbers and stats. I'm still training to qualify in that.

Now the ultimate question- if I had my time all over again, would I have moved from med phys to medicine again? To be honest, that's a really hard question for me to answer, and I can't 100% say yes on that. What I'll probably say is that in the context of doing the population medicine stuff, and what I get to do with that, and where I plan to eventually work, it was worth it. But if it had been regular clinical medicine on the wards, then probably not.