Your most valuable asset is not your savings or your house. It is your ability to earn: decades of an attending's income still ahead of you. Disability insurance is the only thing that protects it, and most residents either ignore it or trust the wrong policy to do the job.
The whole policy turns on one phrase — how it defines "disabled." There are two versions, and they are not close.
Own-occupation pays you if an illness or injury keeps you from doing your specialty, even if you could still earn a living doing something else. A surgeon who develops a hand tremor can no longer operate, but she could teach or read scans. A true own-occupation policy pays her the full benefit anyway, and lets her keep that new income on top. Any-occupation is the reverse: it pays only if you cannot work any job you are reasonably suited for. That same surgeon, able to teach, collects nothing.
For a physician, that single distinction is almost the entire value of the policy.
Here is the trap. The coverage your hospital hands you for free is usually group "any-occupation," or own-occupation for just the first two years before it quietly converts to any-occupation. It tends to replace only half your pay up to a monthly cap that looks fine on a resident's salary and falls far short of an attending's. It is not yours: leave the job and it stays behind. And because your employer paid the premium, the benefit is taxable the day you finally need it.
The fix is an individual "true own-occupation" policy, specialty-specific, that you own and carry from job to job. Buy the largest monthly benefit you qualify for (insurers cap it near 60% of income), and because you pay the premium with after-tax dollars, that benefit comes to you tax-free.
The timing is the part no one mentions: buy it as a resident, not as an attending. You are younger, cheaper, and, most important, still healthy on paper. One diagnosis between now and your first attending job can get you rated or declined. Many training programs offer guaranteed-issue coverage with no medical exam; apply there first, since a rejection on the open market can lock you out of it. A future-increase rider then lets you scale the benefit to an attending's income later without medical underwriting again.
So when an agent hands you a quote, do not start with the price. Ask one question first: if I could not practice my specialty but could still work, does this pay? If the answer is no, the rest of the quote does not matter.
Insure the thing that makes you a doctor.