Should we feel sorry for the junior doctors?

Back in the middle 1970s, when I was a junior doctor, we worked long hours. I mean, long. Despite David Mellor's famous remark that accounts of doctors working long hours were "fisherman's tales", they were true.

For nearly four years I worked what what was called "one in two". That means working every other night and every other weekend, over and above the forty hours of "nine to five" duty. A weekend, therefore, started at nine on Friday morning and ended at five pm on Monday evening- 80 hours of continuous on-call. The total averaged out to 120 hours a week. Of course not all these hours were spent working. Sometimes, blessedly, you could spend an uninterrupted night in your bed, though in practice these nights were few and far between. You could be called from your bed two, three, four times in a night, effectively destroying any possibility of sleep. My most demanding job was paediatrics. During the day I would work on the wards, but at night the responsibility extended to the neonatal ward as well, where we would have to attend any delivery deemed "difficult". This often  resulted in what I have always found to be the most stressful situation in medicine: while already engaged in one task, you are called upon to do another. I remember discussing this with a consultant once, and he said:
"yes, it is hard, but think of it this way: you're gathering the experience from two jobs while only doing one." Did that make me feel better? Not exactly.

Worse, the government of the day had just imposed a contract whereby we got paid 30% of our normal rate when working "out of hours" (ie other than nine to five) You haven't mis-read: we were paid 70% less when working "unsocial hours". We were furious, we demonstrated, we worked to rule, we even threatened all out strikes (though this never happened). It was nearly 20 years before these rules were replaced with a more equitable contract.

Junior doctors today have a much better contract than we did, yet they appear to enjoy support from much of the community in their endeavours to secure a better one.. Even the SWP (Socialist Worker's Party) would like to organise a general strike to support them. But others feel that perhaps they protest too much. The inescapable fact is that junior doctor do not remain junior for very long, and by the time they become consultants or partners in general practice they enjoy very good rates of pay indeed, often over £100,000 a year. Plus their pensions are so good they are the envy of almost every other professional group. So maybe they should shut up and get on with it?