Introduction

			Introduction The United States spends about 11 percent of its gross national product, over $500 billion, each year on health care. While much of this money goes to develop new procedures and advanced equipment, we spend most in the areas of treatment and prevention. Our system requires highly trained workers. Almost 7 million people work in the health care field. Economists expect long-term job growth in this industry to be higher than average, however some medical careers will grow much faster than others. Students thinking about pursuing a medical career often do so because they have an idealized notion about helping others. Often, they are not aware of the many different job possibilities in medicine unless they know people who work in the field. Many people only associate medical careers with hospitals and doctors' offices. They do not realize there are other opportunities in different settings and related fields. They forget that medical workers also maintain health, prevent illness, and provide support for practitioners. We want our entry to help students investigate the many medical job possibilities and focus their healthcare career exploration. Before you begin browsing through our site, you might want to take a very short quiz to see how much you already know about healthcare careers. One last thing before you start to explore, many of our links will take you out of our site. With most browsers you should be able to tell our pages by their distinctive format and top image. If you link outside of our site you can return by using your browser's back button. Also, if you think you may want to come back later, don't forget to bookmark this page now. We hope you enjoy yourself and learn something about healthcare careers while you are here.