Update 2021: Addressing the epidemic of burnout, depression, and suicide in medicine
I developed this site many years ago to help those aiming for medical careers achieve their dreams, but did not adequately emphasize that interest in medicine and aptitude for it are not sufficient reasons to pursue that goal. As documented by some of the references listed below (and countless others I could add), the medical profession is plagued by an epidemic of burnout, depression, and suicide, the best antidote for which is a stark dose of reality in which people honestly admit why they are drawn to medicine.
I know many doctors but can't think of one who would continue working if paid what average Americans make: now (2021) roughly $25 per hour. In contrast, I would have a difficult time listing all doctors I know who hate medicine and barely tolerate it because they are well-paid. Thus people who enter medicine are less likely to love it than to torment themselves by being trapped in pressure-cooker careers plagued by burnout, depression, and suicide.
Bitterly regretting that career choice can be prevented by pondering other motivations. Do you like people — really? Americans have such a low threshold for hatred they commonly dislike others with different political beliefs, as if that should be a sin in a nation that supposedly embodies freedom. As difficult as it is for Americans to genuinely like and respect one another, that difficulty is magnified when dealing with patients who are frequently more cranky, demanding, and self-centered than ever, according to what I hear from nurses who haven't yet found a way to escape that profession.
I did a reasonably good job of conveying that unfortunate reality in prior books and websites because I believe that the medical profession is best served when people enter it with both eyes open, fully aware of what they are getting themselves into.
However, most of the fault goes not to patients but to doctors who have masterfully equated healthcare with what they do, which largely boils down to prescribing drugs and performing surgery. Doctors give lip service to prevention yet ignore over 99% of possible preventive measures as well as countless ways to help people feel better physically and mentally, performing better in school and on the job.
For example, more than a few pediatricians have patients who struggle in school and even more with dreams but not the intellectual capacity to achieve them. If asked to provide specific actionable advice, most pediatricians could recite only obvious tips of limited effectiveness, explaining why we have lots of pediatricians but also lots of people who cannot transform themselves from poor students to superb ones, as I did.
This is one of many examples illustrating how the medical profession routinely — not just occasionally — fails to optimally help people live better lives. For those who genuinely care about others, it can be very upsetting to eventually realize that all of the years spent in training leaves them woefully equipped to give people what they deserve.
While some doctors are so misled they still believe that the path to health is paved with pills and surgery, others are awakening to the reality that we need a new approach, much better for patients and practitioners as well as everyone sick of paying through the nose for healthcare that rarely delivers the best health. I spent years proving this beyond a reasonable doubt by writing a book, now well over 3300 pages and growing daily (update January 29, 2023: it's now 4352 pages), presenting incontrovertible evidence that we need a new medical specialty more cognizant of how health is affected by the lives people lead at home, in their yards, cars, at work and elsewhere.
This immersion, and consequences from it, are barely acknowledged by primary care physicians who just scratch the surface in helping people dodge possible threats to their health and happiness. The nascent concept known as the exposome partially encompasses the focus of my book, which also illustrates that physicians commonly ignore research conducted by university-affiliated scientists and published in reputable medical journals.
I am addicted to reading the medical literature and spend several hours per day doing that, 365 days per year, collecting so much figurative gold I can't understand why all doctors aren't equally obsessed with learning. One obvious impediment is time, because most doctors are so busy working they don't have enough time to learn what they should know, which is considerably more than that taught during medical school and residency.
Many primary care visits involve patients who don't feel good psychologically, seeking advice from doctors who themselves are miserable. Similarly, patients who should lose weight are often counseled by doctors who need to lose weight.
Early in my medical career, I was so fat I couldn't see my feet when I stood up, but I lost that weight and for decades afterward maintained a waistline of 29 – 32 inches without starving myself or exercising as much as I should, with the time for that frequently robbed by my magnetic attraction to medical and science journals along with spending many thousands of hours focused on developing new innovations, one of which was inspired by a kid who bullied me in elementary school.
One day I had a flash of insight and prototyped it to test my concept, finding that it could safeguard people from physical bullying — children and others, including people like my Mom who was pounded by my father until her bones broke. She saw a doctor and received the usual care but no effective advice on how to protect herself from my father the thug.
Patients commonly receive other inside-the-box treatment omitting what they need most. Consequently, when I visit the upscale yuppie town I shop in, even before the pandemic I rarely saw anyone who appeared both happy and healthy. Since virtually all those folks have doctors, thinking people are bound to wonder why doctors aren't doing more for them. Because the docs don't know, because their training equips them to prescribe drugs and perform surgery, not deliver optimal health and happiness, which generally are as elusive to doctors as everyone else. Long before I was born, “Doctor, heal thyself” was a common theme, yet the message still hasn't gotten through to most people in the medical profession.
This article typifies the obtuseness of the medical profession: Irregular sleep schedules connected to bad moods and depression, study shows: The more variation in wake-up time and sleep time, the worse mood and more chance of depression symptoms in study of first-year medical residents.
The fact that sleep is essential to physical and mental health is hardly new news, yet one of the most salient features of medical education is sleep deprivation and frequently changing sleep schedules. The need for sleep falls somewhere between Captain Obvious stuff and “duh!,” so chronically trivializing the value of sleep (as leaders in medical education have done) is about as daffy as shooting people and then wondering why they bleed.
Yet this is only the tip of the stupidity iceberg, because there are countless other ways in which medical educators are dunces in health. Another way in which they strike out is not beginning medical education with tips relevant to health, such as teaching them to eat food conducive to brainpower and then implementing that by having medical school and hospital cafeterias serve fare that best serves health. Instead, in every of the many hospitals I ate in, the food was ordinary, optimized for taste, not what is best for bodies and minds.
I understand that people are addicted to the pleasure of eating (I am, too), yet that fondness need not be a perpetual noose around our necks because I eventually discovered how to change flavor so healthy, convenient, and affordable food can taste like the yummy stuff we crave. If my innovation were commercialized, it would transform healthcare by obviating the need for much of it, because many health problems and premature graves are figuratively dug by forks and spoons.
Before conceiving that idea, I succumbed to food addiction, becoming so fat I dreaded what I saw in the mirror. Bad food and other triggers eventually sent me into Class IV heart failure, where I hovered for years, affecting me physically and mentally (it's easy to spot the crap I wrote back then), but I bounced back so well I can shovel my 400-foot driveway and enjoy it, or do what I did yesterday: spend an hour walking up and down a steep hill in deep snow and wish that I had more free time to continue that.
So if I can come back from the brink of death, why can't more doctors help more patients achieve similar recoveries without drugs (that often trigger nasty side effects) and without bankrupting them with healthcare that is often more expensive than effective? Because most doctors are dunces in health.
Doctors have become masters of trite but ineffective advice. “Exercise,” says the chubby doctor who doesn't. “Eat right,” says docs scarfing down doughnuts and other goodies in the break room. Collectively, this group of abysmal problem solvers hasn't come to grips with the biggest driver of the COVID-19 pandemic: the fact that we inhale air and germs recently exhaled by others.
So simple, so obvious, yet largely swept under the rug as they advocated for masks (even perfunctory ones), social distancing, therapeutics, and vaccines that combined are much less effective than my method of blocking airborne germ transmission that I conceived and prototyped very early in the pandemic.
If you worry about your child's safety in school, every doctor on the planet doesn't have a good solution. Except me: I have hundreds of innovative ways to stop school shooters and other criminals because nothing can erase your health and happiness faster than a gun, knife, or otherwise a willingness to overpower others, whether to rob them, beat them up, or rape them.
The adage “God created men, Col. Colt made them equal” encapsulated the idea that anyone armed with a Colt firearm could defend themselves. Or try to: the weak link in the chain isn't the gun but the person shooting it. As the New York Times documented in A Hail of Bullets, a Heap of Uncertainty, police usually miss their targets. Even when they fire at dogs (who never shoot back), only about “55 percent of shots hit home.” Who do they hit? Too often bystanders. Or nobody: San Francisco officers fired 65 shots at a homicide suspect but hit no one. A RAND Corporation report found that New York police had a hit rate of 18% during gunfights and 30% “when suspects did not return fire.”
Thus even if there is a good guy with a gun in a classroom, once the bullets start flying, they frequently won't hit the thug but instead others. Perhaps your son or daughter, or the teacher.
Thomas Edison was fond of the saying, “There's a way to do it better — find it.” So I did. Once my ideas are commercialized, I predict they will revolutionize personal defense not only in schools but everywhere you go: at home, work, shopping, dining out, and walking around town — all places that people have been victimized. One of the latest ones: Paul Pelosi, the multimillionaire spouse of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, attacked in their upscale home in a nice neighborhood.
Guns simply are not appropriate for countless situations. You can't arm your 10-year-old daughter with a pistol, but in the near future you will have more effective ways to defend her and other loved ones.
Much of what I did as an ER doctor was patch up people after they were injured or otherwise suffered the consequences of inadequate prevention. I thought there must be a better way, and there is.
PS: I can talk much faster than type, so I now write using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, speech recognition software that sometimes works superbly but other times mangles text in bizarre ways. Thus if you spot a typo, please tell me about it.
Update Autumn 2023: A local cardiothoracic surgeon died prematurely, reportedly of suicide. Staff speculated that he was distraught over recent botched cases, including at least one that ended fatally, precipitated by personal problems that impaired his concentration in the OR.
I had plenty of distractions during my ER career, including the murder of my father, but none of that hobbled my performance. It's not that I have superhuman concentration; it's that while at work, work became my sole focus. I experienced a similar phenomenon during medical school, the four years of which I didn't think about snowmobiles — then the love of my life — for a single second, strangely even during blizzards that otherwise would have put me on Cloud Nine. The kicker is that I wasn't interested in medicine (in retrospect, I don't know how I aced medical school); my goal was to get out of it as soon as I could because I hated it with a passion. I also hated mowing lawns and learned to love that.
My interest in medicine was rekindled when I focused on health, after which I averaged thousands of hours per year reading medical journals in search of precious nuggets overlooked by most physicians, for which their patients pay a steep price, as I will prove beyond a reasonable doubt in an upcoming book, now over 4500 pages and growing daily.
Update May 23, 2024: Doctors engage the public by bringing a human side to social media
Excerpt: “A few years ago, doctors flooded social media with photos of themselves in swimsuits, along with the hashtag #medbikini. The reason? A recently published study suggested it was "unprofessional" for women physicians to post photos of themselves in bikinis. … Although the study caused a major outcry and was eventually retracted … Studies have shown that this pressure to appear professional can lead to burnout and even suicide.”
Comment: I have fought this battle for decades, which transcends this topic to include more pervasive oppression that stifles physicians and harms patients. Doctors are basically put in a pressure cooker and expected not to vent nor to warn others contemplating this profession without balancing its advantages with its stark drawbacks that I've illuminated in countless ways in various books and websites, beginning in the past century. No one wants to be pressured into surrendering their humanity to enter a career that engenders bitter resentment catalyzing burnout and its diverse ramifications to doctors and their patients receiving worse care as a result.
Feeling trapped, they often devote more time into escaping — as I did — than into professional development. This phenomenon is so ubiquitous it helps explain the massive blind spot in medicine in which its practitioners collectively have so far failed to identify the single greatest threat to patient health producing more damage than physicians and surgeons can undo with all of their drugs, operations, and procedures. I will soon target that perennial omission. When I do, it will seem clear as day; now it seems like a complete mystery to other doctors so swamped with problems they haven't connected the dots to reveal the source of so much disease and misery.
How could so many smart professionals fail to see something this consequential that harms virtually everyone? Of the many things doctors learn in medical school, the foremost lesson is: stop thinking for yourself; let the powers that be think for you, telling you what to do and when, acquiescing to insurance companies pulling their strings in penny-wise and pound-foolish ways that have fueled an epidemic of disease that dwarfs the meager savings from them leading doctors by the nose — and wallet — in a mindless pursuit of savings that doesn't materialize as the foremost drivers of disease are given short shrift.
Thus when doctors are pressured to conform and not rock the boat — being like others, speaking like others, thinking like others, acting like others, and dressing like others — it trains them into believing that they are no longer the captain of the ship but instead subordinates just following orders.
The medical-industrial complex benefits when disease is so common that people grudgingly accept exorbitant premiums and taxes enriching the healthcare industry that would be decimated if doctors understood that their current efforts at prevention just scratch the surface of possibilities that haven't yet appeared on the radar screen of medical school professors who are overly enamored with pharmaceuticals and surgery but blind as a bat to countless ways to obviate them while keeping people much healthier than they are now. We need a seismic shift in medicine but its old guard leaders are overly complacent with the current system that is way past its expiration date yet persists because it enriches those who control it by controlling Main Street doctors.
The old guard is nothing new. They tenaciously fought proponents of the germ theory of disease, utterly convinced that germs too small to be seen by the naked eye couldn't possibly injure and kill humans. They dug in their leathery heels using tactics still utilized to keep doctors in line, such as branding opponents as quacks and frauds.
The medical profession deserves great credit for what it does, but it also deserves a kick in the butt for not fostering independence from prescription drugs. Instead, too many people are tethered to them for too long, with too little to show for it, judging by the average physical, mental, and cognitive health that manifests diversely, including the meager percentage of middle-aged and older adults who look good in swimwear.
Upton Sinclair observed that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” With large paychecks, doctors have powerful incentives to toe the party line. This thwarts innovation to promote health without drugs or surgery.
Related October 12, 2023: Americans will spend half their lives taking prescription drugs, study finds
Comment: Swatting flies instead of going after the manure pile.
“The tragedy is that everyone thinks they already have goals. But what they really have are hopes and wishes.”
— Brian Tracy in The Power of Discipline. This dovetails with an article (Children overcoming adversity) that said, “… contrary to prior belief, children in difficult situations need to do more than dream of a happier and successful future self: They need a strategy for becoming that person.”
You want to become a doctor. I want to help you achieve your goal.
I don't think that you will find anyone more qualified than I am to help you become a doctor, because I did it, against all odds. In sixth grade, my teacher said that I was "slow," and I struggled my first two years of high school. I felt lucky to receive Ds in some classes that I should have flunked.
Then everything changed. I earned virtually all As my last two years of high school and throughout college. My college GPA and MCAT scores were so high that I was the one person my medical school accepted per year with only three years of college. I did so well in medical school that I was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha (the med school equivalent of Phi Beta Kappa) after my second year, and graduated in the top 1% of my class.
I was such a shoo-in for an ER residency position (the most coveted residency at that time) that I was offered an under-the-table deal because they wanted to ensure that no other hospital lured me away. The director of my residency program once commented that I was the smartest resident they ever had, and one of my former bosses told me that I was the smartest doctor he ever met. Aren't these implausible accolades for someone who once was a class dunce?
I was not born with that aptitude. I learned how to expand every facet of brainpower from intelligence to creativity, and I can show you how to do the same thing. You will learn more from me than you could from people who were born on third base, yet act as if they just hit a triple. Being dealt four aces doesn't necessarily make one a great poker player.
I achieved this intellectual metamorphosis from dunce to doctor without any tutors, prep courses, or much help from my family. If I can do it, you can, too, because you're probably brighter than I was. The problem is that 99.99% of teachers succeed only in making their students more knowledgeable, not more intelligent or creative. "Slow" kids like me usually fumble through the system and emerge from it without anyone doing anything to materially augment their brainpower. Hidebound by centuries of antiquated teaching methods, today's teachers cannot transform "slow" kids into ones who ace medical school, like I did. Hence, it frustrates me when I hear politicians and teachers' unions suggesting that the primary way to improve education is to increase funding for it. Hogwash.
Although I was trained as an emergency room doctor, most of my advice is applicable to other medical and surgical specialties as well as other careers requiring superb intelligence or creativity.
In addition to presenting tips to enhance your academic success, I will give you an insider's view of what it is like to be an ER doctor. You will learn the pros and cons of a career in emergency medicine while you are being educated, entertained, and often surprised by a very candid doctor who never pulls a punch.
I spent years developing a similar site, www.ERbook.net, which also focuses on emergency rooms and ER as a career. That site needs an aesthetic makeover, but its extensive question and answer pages provide information that you won't find elsewhere. I will post all new topics on this site in its question and answer section. I am willing to answer questions that I have not previously addressed, but please first check both sites to see if I already discussed that matter.
I firmly believe that since I overcame many obstacles yet succeeded, you can do it, too. If you read some of the difficulties I faced (here and here), it will erase any doubts you may have about whether you can become a doctor or other professional in a challenging career. You can, and with my help, you will.
I helped many people succeed, such as a struggling student depressed about his abysmal grades that seemed to shatter his dreams of becoming a doctor. He is now a brilliant medical student. Another person was trapped in a dead-end job, convinced she didn't have The Right Stuff to become a doctor. With my help, she did; she is now a professor at the medical school I attended (Wayne State), and she is chair of her department at a hospital in the Detroit Medical Center. I gave yet another person the boost she needed. She is now a neuroradiologist, medical school professor, and president of a prestigious medical organization. Note the pattern: not only did I help them, but I helped them become outstanding.
If you want to wear a white coat and earn the right to be called a doctor, the time to start is now. Ready? Let's go.
“Who are we to worry about, or compare ourselves to, others’ dreams when we can't even execute on our own?”
— Michael Lazerow
“Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.”
— Les Brown
“Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.”
— Farrah Gray
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
— Chinese Proverb
“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”
— Calvin Coolidge, President of the United States 1923 – 1929
“As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.”
— Bill Gates
Notes/Thinking of becoming a doctor? Get a second opinion.
- July 2024 video: I Was An MIT Educated Neurosurgeon Now I'm Unemployed And Alone In The Mountains How Did I Get Here?
Comment: I know the feeling. Condensing his 48-minute video: he became a doctor to help people but was disillusioned after realizing that preventive medicine is woefully neglected in favor of pharmaceuticals and surgery that physicians, surgeons, and the rest of us are almost brainwashed into believing are the backbone of health. He knows that doctors have economic incentives to focus on drugs and surgery — recall what Upton Sinclair said about how money warps judgment? - September 16, 2022: The emotional labor of staying cheerful at work can lead to employee burnout
Comment: This problem plagues healthcare professions. We are trained to act as if we like or tolerate all patients, but the reality is something else. Socializing outside of work or venting when patients aren't around, the truth comes out — and the truth isn't pretty: doctors, nurses, and other healthcare staff often dislike if not hate various patients, not once in a blue moon but commonly a few times per shift. Average patients shouldn't breathe a sigh of relief because healthcare workers who act as if they care about patients often don't; they just want them out the door, gone, vamoose!
Over the years (now decades), I've done my best attempting to get healthcare personnel to empathize with patients. If they are stupid, annoying, or troublemakers, I don't know of one example in human history in which a good person wished to become stupid, annoying, or worse. Many — likely most — cognitive and emotional shortcomings are caused or contributed to by numerous factors that healthcare personnel routinely overlook. While primary care physicians give lip service to prevention, they ignore over 99% of possible preventive factors, as I prove beyond a reasonable doubt in an upcoming book that is now over 4200 pages and growing daily. This affects people every hour of every day of their lives, dragging them down with numerous physical, emotional, and cognitive problems.
Ironically, healthcare personnel rarely recognize their complicity in this vicious circle of dysfunction. It is our job as health experts to educate patients, but they are instead hoodwinked into believing that pharmaceuticals and surgery pave the path to optimal health. No, they don't, as should be obvious by looking at the prevalence of physical and mental problems in healthcare personnel. If their knowledge were the elixir of health they want patients to believe, their inside information should make them exemplary models for health. Instead, the converse is often true.
Related: The New York Times October 19, 2022: These Doctors Admit They Don't Want Patients With Disabilities: When granted anonymity in focus groups, physicians let their guards down and shared opinions consistent with experiences of many people with disabilities.
Comment: Of the hundreds of doctors I've known, two seemed to genuinely enjoy their jobs and care about patients; the others seemed to care much more about making money from them — and in more cases than I can remember, making fun of them when they weren't around. Medical school professors living in their Ivory Tower dream worlds don't want to address this grim reality, so they pretend it doesn't exist.
As I documented in my upcoming 4200+-page mega-book, researchers found significant mental and physical effects in people working in jobs in which they must put on fake smiles and otherwise pretend to like the public they interface with. Fakery, it seems, comes with a high cost.
The best solution to this problem is to foster genuine empathy. The billion-dollar question is: how? I address this in my mega-book as well as yet another upcoming book, that one on overcoming racism and discrimination with an innovative approach — as opposed to the ineffectual browbeating dished out by the cancel culture that forces people into adopting public veneers more perfect than they genuinely are. You guessed it: even more fakery, with more physical and mental repercussions. Might this help explain why the Flynn effect plateaued and is regressing?
Our society is strangely tolerant of fakery by permitting and even encouraging people to hide behind false veneers, but they have adverse consequences. One example is the “Coward of Broward” sheriff's deputy arrested for hiding instead of confronting the gunman slaughtering students in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Another is the small army of law enforcement officials in Uvalde, Texas who evidently valued their lives more than the lives of the students in Robb Elementary School.
Other examples: the many processed food companies and restaurants who claim to care about their customers but instead feed them foods no one with an ounce of common sense would give to their pets.
And another: politicians whose words claim they care about us, with actions proving they don't.
Then there are the big-box retailers selling junk that often quickly fails and is sometimes toxic, wasting our time and money and often shortening our lives and filling them with needless health problems, as I document with myriad examples in my upcoming mega-book. - The New York Times June 15, 2023: The Moral Crisis of America's Doctors: The corporatization of health care has changed the practice of medicine, causing many physicians to feel alienated from their work.
Comment: I grew up thinking the goal of medicine was to maximally help patients, but today's primary objective is maximally profiting from them. If this were not true, doctors would invest significantly more time into prevention but their knowledge of that subject is so superficial they overlook over 99% of possible preventive measures, as I prove beyond a reasonable doubt in an upcoming book that is currently 4489 pages and growing daily.
Having worked longer as a doctor than I originally planned, I am well-acquainted with the noxiousness of medicine that triggers burnout, depression, and sometimes suicide. Hoping to circumvent it, physicians commonly medicate themselves with money (and stuff that money can buy), but that prescription is poorly effective, as I discovered while raking in piles of money as an ER doctor sometimes working two jobs.
Thomas Edison was fond of the saying, “There's a way to do it better — find it.” There is, but because it isn't a prescription drug or surgery (the core of modern healthcare, unfortunately), few doctors know how to help themselves feel better. Ergo, they don't: hence the epidemic of burnout, depression, and suicide. Lather, rinse, repeat. - October 19, 2022: In stressful jobs, depression risk rises with hours worked, study in new doctors finds
Comment: To become a doctor, I worked 110 hours per week for years, teaching me an essential lesson: get the hell out of this miserable profession that pretends as if doctors are robots! The irony is that all those hours decimated the effectiveness of my education; had I been able to chart my own educational course, I could have designed a vastly more effective one. The dirty little secret in medicine is that doctors in training work excessive hours not because it is good for them or their future patients but because it is more profitable for the slave-drivers dictating medical education in the United States. - $1 million mistake: Becoming a doctor
- This is the personality trait that most often predicts success: conscientiousness. If you don't have it, you won't be a good doctor, no matter how smart you are or how much you know. Here's a true story that illustrates conscientiousness.
- Personality outsmarts intelligence at school: Conscientiousness and openness key to learning
- Grit better than GRE for predicting grad student success
- If you want to become a doctor, what I'm holding should scare the living daylights out of you: an amazingly thick brochure of the 11th annual Non-Clinical Careers for Physicians conference. Now ask yourself: if being a doctor is such a desirable profession, why on Earth is there a demand for an expensive course that teaches ways to escape clinical medicine?
Going to medical school was the biggest mistake of my life. Why I excelled in it is a mystery because my heart wasn't in it, explaining why I had such difficulty focusing in class and while studying — or trying to. - August 18, 2022: Suffering from burnout, doctors are working drunk or high on the job: report
- How Being a Doctor Became the Most Miserable Profession: Nine of 10 doctors discourage others from joining the profession, and 300 physicians commit suicide every year. When did it get this bad?
Comment: In 1980, my older brother presciently realized that medicine was bound to become a very noxious profession, so he warned me to not go into it. I didn't listen, making the single greatest mistake of my life. Unfortunately, medical school admissions committees are just as foolish as many applicants in assuming they should become doctors if they like science, excel in it, aren't allergic to hard work, and can't think of anything better to do. Wrong! Medicine can be a fabulous profession for some people, but when you're young, it isn't easy to predict what you'll be like when you mature.
Secondly, the optimism of youth blinds medical students and wannabes into thinking they will magically escape the myriad drawbacks of medicine, such as ones presented in that brilliant article and ones I presented in the past few decades, but figuratively closing your eyes and hoping for the best won't deliver it. To dodge problems, you must focus on them and intelligently plan ways to circumvent them. - Scientific American: Doctors and Suicide: The rate among students, residents and physicians is significantly higher than average—but so-called “wellness initiatives” can help
- June 25, 2024: California radiologist who drove car off cliff with family inside will not face trial: Dharmesh Patel, 42, was granted a mental health diversion by a court Thursday due to evidence that he has major depressive disorder, according to the San Mateo County District Attorney's Office.
- Suicide rate higher than average for female clinicians
- Medscape National Physician Burnout & Suicide Report 2020: The Generational Divide
- Medscape: My Millennial Doctor Peers Think They're Walking Into a Crisis
Excerpt #1: “[referring to a young orthopedic surgery colleague who decided to quit practicing medicine] Overall, he felt that medicine was a sinking ship on which doctors were losing autonomy quickly and that this was a path leading straight to burnout.”
Comment: He is correct. Going into medicine was unquestionably the worst mistake of my life. Medicine has some obvious attractions but drawbacks most doctors discover too late, analogous to marrying a beautiful woman and then discovering things about her that make you want to run away from her as fast as you can.
Every so often I hear from doctors saying I shouldn't discuss those drawbacks because "we need good people in medicine." True, but the best way to get them is to deceive them so they don't know what they're getting into? Does. Not. Compute.
I prefer the honest approach so students considering that career have a more balanced perspective of what awaits them instead of relying on pollyannaish blind faith that, when shattered, too often leads to burned-out doctors providing second-grade care. And that is the best way to get good people in medicine? Hogwash!
Secondly, frank discussions of the drawbacks of medicine are beneficial because not everyone hates the same things, thus warts-and-all portrayals of what medicine is like are more likely to result in the next generation of doctors being better suited for the sorry mess of what medicine has degenerated into.
Thirdly, some of those drawbacks can be avoided or minimized if doctors know about them in advance instead of blindly encountering them later, after it's too late.
Excerpt #2: “On average, one doctor a day in the United States ends his or her own life. Physicians commit suicide at a rate twice that of the general population, and over 1 million patients will lose their doctors to suicide every year. … Physician suicide is heartbreaking and screams crisis. … Many physicians are crying for help and nobody is listening. Some sadly feel that the only way out is to end their lives.”
Comment #2: The best way to analyze this topic is to generalize it, exploring one of its ultimate roots: poor education. It's not that doctors are dumbbells (clearly not); it is that our educational system has too much chaff and not enough wheat.
In retrospect, there was plenty of time for teachers and professors to educate me and others so we could better avoid and deal with frequent (in many cases almost inevitable) problems encountered during our personal and professional lives. There must have been time for that because there was lots of time for teaching fluff I didn't need, such as mythology, music, and creative writing (the latter gave me an opportunity to showcase my ability but did nothing to appreciably amplify it).
All that math I had — its raison d'être didn't add up: all of the math I needed as a doctor could have been shoehorned into a very short math class or, better yet, two weeks of self-instruction: the time it took me to learn computer programming on my own, beginning with knowing virtually nothing about it (not even the basics of HTML) to programming an interactive website (MySpamSponge) coded in PHP and MySQL. Thus it wasn't that I needed years of math classes; my teachers and professors needed them to justify their paychecks. Ditto for most of my other education.
I had this crazy idea that I would encounter crazy people only in clinical situations. Wrong; the world is so teeming with them I met some while dating, others at work and elsewhere in the real world, just as others do with many of us unprepared for how to best deal with them. That would have helped my father, too, who was murdered by someone he met from a personal ad.
Everyone dates, works, and buys or rents a home or apartment along with countless other aspects of adult life that teachers and professors typically ignore or give short shrift to. Sidetracked by teaching what we don't need, there's too little time to teach what we do.
Everyone also tries to stay healthy. You might think that I, having graduated in the top 1% of my class in medical school, would have been an expert in health, but I then knew so little about it I made many preventable mistakes and paid the price for them. After decades of studying health (as opposed to medicine, which is based on the fantasy that the optimal path to health is paved with pills and surgery), I now realize that what almost everyone does is analogous to walking blind through a minefield, encountering dangers that could have been avoided. With health unquestionably the most precious thing we have, being so ignorant of it because educators have other priorities is simply unconscionable.
Depression is depressingly common, affecting most people to varying degrees at some point in their lives and often throughout it, and with almost everyone not feeling as good as they could. If doctors could solve that problem, they wouldn't lead the league in terms of suicide — but they do.
After many years of giving in to my addiction to reading research (usually spending at least several hours per day doing that 365 days per year), I learned tips worth their weight in gold relevant to almost every aspect of health, including depression. I could teach a one-hour class summarizing what I found, which teachers and professors could transmit to their students, but too many of them are too busy teaching fluff to teach what we need for better lives and careers. - Responding to work emails after hours found to contribute to burnout, hostility
Comment: This is a big drawback of medical careers: work invariably spills over into your personal life, robbing you of a big chunk of your personal time. That affected me as an ER doctor even though one might think that when my shifts were over, I was OFF. Not so.
First, I worked many hours of unpaid overtime, sometimes three or more hours per day.
Second, I was required to attend department, hospital staff, and various committee meetings and obligations as well as go in early (sometimes one hour or more) or on my “off” days to sign medical records and do other things.
Third, continuing medical education (CME) activities were another time drain, but the biggest time-waster of them all was working afternoon and night shifts put me into a perpetual state of jet lag that decimated my productivity and sucked the joy out of my life.
The recipe for being an ER doctor is pretty much the recipe for burnout. The big paychecks were nice, but having a good life is more important than a good income. - Medscape: What Is the Cost of Physician Burnout in the United States?
Excerpt: “… the suicide rate among physicians tops that of combat veterans.” - Study finds 80% of medical students feel low sense of personal achievement: Research on burnout at osteopathic medical schools also finds 17% report high levels of depersonalization
- Med Student Mental Health 'Crisis': Experts Urge Nationwide Action
- Physicians Experience Highest Suicide Rate of Any Profession
Excerpt: “… 50% of 2106 female physicians who completed a Facebook questionnaire reported meeting criteria for a mental disorder but were reluctant to seek professional help because of the fear of stigma.”
Comment: I've spent many more years learning health than I did learning medicine that ignores or gives scant attention to key aspects of health. Consequently, doctors of medicine often cannot help themselves get and stay healthy, just as they are (obviously) failing to optimize the health and happiness of patients. - Taking education too far: An episode of Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson (Cram Culture) discussed South Korean after-school academies called hagwons extend education so “many kids study 9-15 hours a day, seven days a week.” Not surprisingly, “in 2014, South Korean children were found to be the least happy in a study among developed countries” and in 2013, “suicide overtook transportation accidents as the leading cause of death for young Koreans.”
Life is best when it is balanced, with plenty of time for friends, family, and fun. Despite my education, this basic lesson did not sink in until too late. As a result, I was an academic star but a personal failure—frankly, a self-centered asshole in some ways. This happens to many doctors. We enter medicine with the best of intentions, get beat up and burned out by the system, and gauge our happiness by the size of our paychecks. Of course, money cannot buy happiness, as evidenced by those South Korean suicides of children who could have had bright futures in a prosperous and burgeoning nation.
People need time to stop and smell the roses, put their feet up, enjoy life and all that it has to offer. - More Than Half of General Surgery Residents Think About Quitting
Comment: Mentioning the drawbacks of medical careers and how most doctors eventually regret choosing them is essential so students make the best possible career choices for themselves and society. While being a doctor is often very stressful (except for the cushy specialties), the rewards can be priceless.
I saved many lives as an ER doc. I vividly recall one “save” because I went out of my way and risked my future to save the life of a young black man I knew I couldn't bill. I left the ER (and my malpractice coverage) to run upstairs for his code, which was being botched by the residents responsible for his care. At that facility, a teaching hospital, ER doctors covered the ER only and were supposed to stay there, which I typically did because it was usually so busy I had no other choice.
But one uncharacteristically slow night I heard a code called overhead and decided to go even though I realized I could have been sued for everything I had and would ever earn had the patient not lived, and I knew the dismal odds: 85% of patients who code in hospitals die. Knowing this, American doctors don't step outside the scope of their practice and malpractice coverage to save lives they have no responsibility for.
On the street, Good Samaritan laws give some protection to doctors who go out of their way to help, but that'd be a tough sell in a hospital in which I took over a code the residents were running. The second I entered the room, both residents said “Dr. Pezzi!,” clearly surprised and happy to see me. A somewhat officious (but just doing her job) nurse asked me to spell my name during the code, which she wrote in the medical record detailing the code—thus I knew I'd be named in the lawsuit if the patient died. Families often understand the death of elderly folks but are hopping mad when young people die, so I was treading on very risky waters.
I've never heard of another doc exposing himself to so much potential liability with nothing to gain, but I put that patient's welfare ahead of my own—and I feel very good about that, and also about turning that into a teachable moment because the residents were making a mistake they didn't realize, so if the patient died (which he would have, had I not arrived), they would have learned nothing and chalked up the death to being just another one in that miserable 85% statistic.
With odds like that against me, and with leaving the ER being so medicolegally risky, the “save” was all the more gratifying. Other occupations don't give people equal chances to save lives, so before you reject medicine, consider what you're giving up. Not only did I save his life, but also the lives of the children he likely had afterward, and the lives of their children, and on and on. Ten thousand years from now, many people will likely have lived but wouldn't have had I not saved the life of their predecessor.
In medical school I was taught to treat every patient like a sibling. I didn't always do that, but I did in this case, and I'm darn proud of it. You'd be, too.
“To do more for the world than the world does for you — that is success.”
— Henry Ford - Five things to know about physician suicide
Excerpt: “Increased suicidal ideation begins as early as in medical school, with nearly 1 in 4 students surveyed reporting suicidal ideation within the last 12 months.”
Comment: Proof that medicine is a sick profession. Is it plausible to presume that people so troubled can optimally help patients? Physician, heal thyself. - Amanpour and Company Video: Why Are Doctors Quitting? This Physician Says They Are Demoralized
- 11 stupid ways smart people sabotage their success
- Why Physicians Won't Unite to 'Rescue' Medicine
- Sell Yourself, No one Else Will
Comment: This commendable LinkedIn article is applicable to life in general, not just business careers. One quibble: the author, Bryan Lovgren, seems not to appreciate the benefits of what he terms “a self-deprecating mentality.” There's real-world and scientific evidence that the optimal catalyst for success is appearing to the world as if you have a big head but secretly doubting your ability so you wake up every day with a fire in your belly compelling you to do something great to prove your worth. You can go a step further and utilize social rejection, which is incomparably effective.
Had I not possessed a self-deprecating mentality, I likely wouldn't have become a doctor and surely would not have graduated in the top 1% of my class, nor would I have subsequently accomplished goals that make medical school seem like a walk in the park. Once I can reveal the inventions I have up my sleeve, their benefits to billions of people now and forever will underscore the upside to thinking so little of yourself it fuels a perpetual quest to improve.
The complacency of narcissists stems from inflated self-assessments that undermines the incentive to prove themselves because in their minds, they have nothing to prove: they think they're great, so there's no need to do anything more to justify it. Parenthetically, that is one reason why narcissists often excel only in careers in which appearance (not just physical appearance) is key, such as politics or the myriad silver-tongued talking heads on television who often have high IQs but achieve almost nothing tangible.
Henry Ford said, “Don't find fault, find a remedy; anybody can complain.” It is so easy for TV's talking heads, and other functional idiots in general, to complain about others, but inherent in their criticisms is tacit boasting they have better ideas and solutions. If so, where are they? None of the narcissists on TV have a plan better than mine: a way to give more to those who receive benefits from government while draining less from taxpayers, simultaneously strengthening the social glue that binds us together: rich, poor, and in-between. I was tired of the malignant divisiveness that increasingly fractures America, so I did something about it. - Babies can learn that hard work pays off: Infants try harder after seeing adults struggle to achieve a goal
Comment: Worth pondering. - What triggers a high-school student to suddenly drop out?
Comment: My urge to drop out of high school was motivated by a fondness for easy. I wanted the easy way through life, and my freshman/sophomore courses—although standard—were too hard for me to mentally digest. Our affinity for something often reflects our aptitude for it and whether it's easy or hard. At that time, I excelled in eating cookies, popping pimples, mowing lawns, and lifting weights, not thinking, studying, or taking tests. So my bright idea was to drop out, work on an auto assembly line, and keep pumping iron. Then everything changed after I stumbled upon ways to boost brainpower. - Majority of US physicians say they're burned out or depressed
Comment: Nearly two-thirds! Now think: how can docs unable to help themselves with something so basic help patients with such common problems? They usually cannot, except with drugs that are often expensive and frequently loaded with noxious or risky side effects. Let's face it: the you-have-a-problem, you-need-a-pill approach to “healthcare” (ahem!) is misguided. - Why Self-Care Hasn't Cured Your Burnout: The way out isn't endless leisure. It's finding meaningful work, outside of your career.
- Why Do Female Physicians Keep Dying By Suicide At Mount Sinai St. Luke's Hospital? In the span of two years, three women — two physicians and one medical student — died by suicide while at Mount Sinai St. Luke's Hospital.
- Medical student's death highlights high rates of physician suicides
Comment: After Kathryn Stascavage jumped to her death, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai responded in part by putting “a moratorium on inducting medical students into Alpha Omega Alpha, a prominent national honor society.” This is like canceling the Olympics because most people aren't world-class athletes. In other words, it is ridiculous, bound to be ineffectual, and evidence that medical education leaders don't understand roots of burnout.
Being inducted into Alpha Omega Alpha did nothing to shield me from burnout. To the extent that it depressed doctors who didn't make it into Alpha Omega Alpha: well, that's life. Unlike the Lake Wobegon effect (a.k.a. illusory superiority), named after Garrison Keillor's fictional town where “all the children are above average,” not everyone can be at the top of their class.
The pain of failure, or not succeeding as much as you wish, can provide a burning desire to burn the midnight oil (work hard) and work smart to succeed. Working smart is one of the primary lessons conveyed in this website and some of my other publications. Being more intelligent and mentally efficient enables greater success with the same input of time, so students who aspire for excellence have an incentive to read what I've written. - March 31, 2021: Nursing graduate students report high levels of stress, anxiety, depression: Nearly one-quarter of survey respondents at CU College of Nursing report struggling with stress, depression and anxiety; almost one-quarter more score within area of clinical concern
- Three quarters of Americans concerned about burnout among healthcare professionals
Comment: 100% should be. - March 23, 2021: Global health care worker burnout is high and 'unsustainable'
- April 21, 2021: Survey of 3,536 healthcare workers suggests 67% are suffering burnout
- Let’s talk about female physician suicide
- Enough Talk: Preventing Burnout During Medical Training
- 5 Surprising Causes of Burnout: Are you stuck in a job so demoralizing or stressful, you look at Sisyphus and think, “That doesn't look so bad.” The Savvy Psychologist explains 5 surprising causes of burnout
Excerpt: “The last symptom, depersonalization, is being cynical, critical, and resentful with co-workers and clients. If you frequently mutter, ‘What is with these people?’, ‘Idiots!’, or any number of NSFW labels, you may be on your way to depersonalization.”
Comment #1: Sisyphean tasks are laborious and futile.
Comment #2: Sentiments common in medicine. - Three factors could explain physician burnout
Excerpt: [quoting Dr. Andrew G. Alexander] “Doctors now spend more time with electronic health records than they do with patients. Electronic health records were pushed by the government at great expense and without regard to the effects upon patient or physician health. Go into any hospital and look for the nurses and the doctors. You will find them sitting in front of computers. They are not happy, and their patients are not healthier.”
Comment #1: But in the land of the once-free, American politicians don't care. There is nothing inherently bad about electronic health records (EHRs); I programmed my own in the 1980s and loved using that system. EHRs can do more than document what was done; properly conceived and implemented, they can turn average practitioners into superior ones routinely delivering topnotch care while saving money and time. But EHRs are often developed by people who need more training, intelligence, and creativity. Garbage in, garbage out.
Comment #2: Another factor responsible for burnout is doctors feeling trapped: after investing the best years of their lives and a small fortune into becoming licensed doctors, human susceptibility to the sunk-cost fallacy leads to them escalating and perpetuating their commitment. I decided that I did not want to become a doctor after my first year of college, but not wanting to waste that year, I continued on, applied to medical school, graduated, and worked for years in a job I generally hated. In retrospect, it shouldn't have taken a year to realize that college and I were not a great fit because while I love learning, I HATE sitting in lectures, studying, and taking exams even though I excelled in them; with my five-minute max attention span, trying to pay attention longer than that was sheer torture.
This is one reason why I envy people with circa-$12/hour jobs in retail, light manufacturing, or whatever: if they don't like their job, boss, or co-workers, they can easily find another that also requires little or no training or investment. They're free, which is priceless. - April 27, 2021: EHR usability issues linked to nurse burnout and patient outcomes
Comment: EHR = electronic health record. - Primary care physicians experience more burnout and anxiety than other health professions: New George Mason University study examines rates of anxiety, frustration, and other behaviors connected to burnout among health care professionals in primary care
Comment: Unsurprisingly. - January 12, 2021: High levels of clinician burnout identified at leading cardiac centre
Excerpt: “More than half the clinicians surveyed at the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre reported burnout and high levels of distress …” - Stress from using electronic health records is linked to physician burnout
Comment: I developed a way to make electronic health records fun yet much better at delivering superior healthcare at affordable prices. - Electronic Health Records and Doctor Burnout: They have legitimate value, but we physicians entered the profession to connect with and help patients—not stare at a screen
- Electronic Health Records Need a Shot in the Arm
Comment: This article discusses how “artificial intelligence in the form of machine learning … might be able to help overcome the obstacles encountered with EHRs [Electronic Health Records] and unlock their potential for making predictions and improving patient care.” Indeed it could, and eventually will, but to maximally realize that potential and to achieve it as soon as possible requires input from physicians who can think logically and know how to embody that logic in computer algorithms.
In the 1980s, I programmed (in BASIC) the venerable Tandy 100 and 200 laptop computers to implement emergency department electronic health records, which worked superbly, saving me lots of time. With modern computers, I could save even more and make the system significantly more powerful so average practitioners could deliver better care than professors of medicine, and I could do that along with eliminating the clunky computer interface that drives a wedge between doctors and patients.
Let's back up a moment and reflect on the ultimate root of this problem: with so much money thrown at it and with so many lives at stake, why on Earth is it taking so long to develop EHRs that doctors love and respect instead of resent? Because the companies developing them don't know how to find the best talent, nor can LinkedIn find them: its networking method, like other such sites, simply puts a digital veneer on antiquated practices — there is no brilliance separating the wheat from the chaff, so while you can find programmers competent in, say, PHP and MySQL, you have a snowball's chance in hell of finding the absolute best, not only technically competent but those capable of thinking in code to optimally solve the problem, in this case implementing EHRs that save lives, money, and time.
Employers give lip service to meritocracies yet don't know to ideally winnow the stack of applicants, so feebly unable to find the best they substitute other criteria, such as political correctness and appearance — believe it or not, but appearance discrimination is rife, explaining why companies are much more likely to fill a position with someone with a beautiful face than a beautiful mind.
Ironically, computer technology should make it much easier for the cream to rise to the top. I developed such a system and offered it free to LinkedIn years ago, proposing that in a PM to one of their big shot leaders who asked to connect with me (and did) but seemingly had overly thin skin in terms of tolerating my critique of what LinkedIn does wrong, including its numerous bugs but especially its glaring omission of features that would make that site vastly more powerful. Consequently, he didn't even want to see my demonstration of that technology.
Consequently, as Isaac Kohane, computer scientist and chair of the department of biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School, said, “Medical records suck.” They still suck and will suck because EHR market leaders Cerner and Epic, and others, don't know how to find the best minds.
Related: June 15, 2021: EHRs not meeting the challenges of primary care according to new study - March 30, 2021: Yoga only goes so far: How overhauling patient records can curb physician burnout: Wellness programs for health care workers emphasize self-care; they're overlooking a huge contributor to burnout: Patient records
Excerpt: “Judges don't do court stenography. CEOs don't take minutes at meetings. So why do we expect doctors and other health care providers to spend hours recording notes — something experts know contributes to burnout?”
Comment: Because the healthcare system is poor at solving problems; this is just one of many examples. Medical records software need not be painful to use because the one I programmed in the 1980s was a joy to use, and I could now make it even more fun — a real blast, in fact — as well as rewarding on both personal and professional levels. I conceived ways to do that roughly a decade ago while working for an innovation think tank co-founded by an ex-Microsoft top executive. To make a long story short, they did not back me to pursue that innovation, saying it wouldn't be patentable, yet its algorithms likely could have been patented and its extensive database content would unquestionably be protected by copyright. Years later, medical records software companies have nothing remotely comparable. - April 6, 2021: Burnout urgently needs robust research
- Isolation and Burnout in Physician Culture: Innovative Solutions
Excerpt: “Burnout is reaching epidemic proportions across medicine.”
Comment: Yes, and I predicted it decades ago—plenty of time to do something about it—and proposed solutions, but the medical profession is better at whining about problems than solving them. The central defect isn't a lack of brains but lack of a spine: the very nature of medical training inculcates reverence to authority, even when that is based more on being pusillanimous than being correct. Having raised chickens, I see behavioral parallels between doctors and chickens, who are often needlessly fearful, find comfort in flocks, but reflexively cower in the face of danger. Most chickens. - Multimorbidity leads to general practitioners suffering burnout: The risk of general practitioners (GPs) suffering burnout increases with the number of patients with complex medical histories
Comment: Physician assistants (PAs) and nurse practitioners (NPs) inadvertently contribute to this problem because they generally take more of the easier cases, leaving doctors with a greater percentage of the challenging ones. I enjoyed the most challenging cases in the ER, but who am I to dismiss their potential toll? I became a poster child for burnout, recovering only when I left medicine. When you're young, it is often easy to trivialize the effects of stress, which slowly erodes the emotional reserve buffering us from life's ups and downs. - What Happens to Your Body When You’re Burnt Out
- Medical students, burnout and alcohol
- Humiliation tops list of mistreatment toward med students
Comment: I somehow escaped that, but I witnessed other classmates being humiliated, such as when a professor of surgery would routinely take us—third-year medical students at the time—into a hospital meeting room, close the door, and grill us with one question after another. If anyone paused before responding, didn't know their stuff, or couldn't express it in grammatically correct sentences and paragraphs without saying “um ”or “uh,” they'd be sharply criticized and sometimes subjected to The Mother of All Humiliations: when the surgery prof would SLAM his fist on the table so hard it shook, and with his neck veins popping out further than I'd ever seen, he'd SCREAM in their faces, “You're too dumb to be a doctor!”
And you know what? He was correct; some med students are indeed too dumb or too lazy to be doctors. He was also wise enough to realize that public humiliation is the best motivator, with research now substantiating its efficacy. Painful? Yes, but not nearly as painful as when those students become doctors who know too little and put too many people into the grave too soon.
As a medical student, I worked 7 days per week, every day of the year, from early morning until late night, studying, studying, and more studying. I didn't waste half the day, as students reportedly do now, frittering away time on social media; I put my nose to the grindstone and worked hard because I knew patients would one day count on me to keep them alive. The surgery professor knew that, too. People who want to slough off should go into something like politics, where they can bamboozle voters into thinking they have bright ideas when all they have is charm and Hollywood looks. And ego.
The docs with marginal mental qualifications—say, the ones who graduated in the bottom half of their class—should be turned into nurses or PAs. - Starla Fitch MD: Don't let your babies grow up to be doctors
Comment: Don't judge a book by its cover, nor an article by its title. - December 5, 2023: From excitement to disillusionment—new research identifies 4 emotional stages of professional careers
- Ped EM docs at risk for developing compassion fatigue, burnout, low compassion satisfaction
- The ugly side of becoming a surgeon by Miko
Comment: This very poignant, heartbreaking story is one of the ultimate stories of medical burnout.
Related:
(a) Exhausted surgeon dismissed as an 'emotional female'
(b) Stress-free training may enhance surgical skill
Comment: Researchers found that “the best way to train surgeons is to remove the stress of residency programs and make surgery a hobby.” I agree. I enjoy performing surgery and various procedures such as spinal taps and inserting central IVs, but I and other medical students frequently loathed training under surgeons who seemed less concerned with teaching than acting like egomaniacs who think the world is a better place the more they abuse people. I don't recall any abuse directed at me, but surgeons threw so many temper tantrums I was constantly on edge, worrying I would be their next target.
Other research has shown that a bit of stress is conducive to learning, but the ambient stress in medical school is way above that as a baseline, so amplifying stress can be very counterproductive. - More than 70% of young oncologists in Europe suffer symptoms of burnout
- Physician Burnout Climbs 10% in 3 Years, Hits 55%
- Mayo Clinic: Physicians and burnout: It's getting worse
- Physician burnout costs the US health care system approximately $4.6 billion a year
- Burnout and scope of practice in new family physicians
- Physician burnout: Resilience training is only part of the solution
Comment: Resilience training? Why not fix the problems? - Medscape Lifestyle Report 2016: Bias and Burnout
Excerpt: “This year's Medscape survey, echoing other recent national surveys, … strongly suggests that burnout among US physicians has reached a critical level. … the highest percentages of burnout occurred in critical care, urology, and emergency medicine, all at 55%. … In this year's Medscape lifestyle survey, as in previous years, more female physicians … expressed burnout than their male peers …”
Comment: Decades ago, I began writing about problems affecting doctors I knew would catalyze burnout and hence harm them and patients. - Combating Physician Burnout: Tactics and Strategies for Easing Burnout
Comment: With physician burnout being so prevalent, the problem obviously isn't the doctors but the profession and how it is caught between a rock and a hard place. - What medicine can teach academia about preventing burnout
The medical programmes we see in our training as physician-scientists are becoming more progressive and supportive of students. Here’s what academia can learn from them, say Yoo Jung Kim and Erik Faber. - New study highlights prevalence of PTSD among obstetricians and gynaecologists
- Chance of depression in new doctors depends on where they train: Survey of first-year internal medicine residents shows those in programs with longer hours, less faculty mentoring & more research focus had higher depression scores
- British pilots score high on burnout scale -- but still perform well
- One in four new doctors may be depressed, and their patients may suffer because of it
- “… Dr Pam Wible reports that 75% of American medical students and residents are taking stimulants, antidepressants, or other psychiatric medications.” (source)
Comment: Nothing says SOMETHING IS SERIOUSLY WRONG WITH THE MEDICAL PROFESSION more strongly than that. Ironic that people purportedly so adept at healing cannot heal themselves; the fact they take such crap highlights their ignorance of better alternatives. I got sick of that nuttiness many years ago and left medicine, likely for good. One root of the problem is that doctors are poor at solving problems. The medical profession was besieged by a perfect storm of government meddling, insurance companies and hospital administrators usurping ultimate decision-making, and attorneys blind to most cases of malpractice who see it in Technicolor when it simply doesn't exist. Today's practitioners pay for the spinelessness of past generations of doctors. - Days after I posted the above:
NYU Resident, Medical Student Die by Suicide 5 Days Apart
Comment: A psychiatry resident! - Female Docs Afraid to Admit Seeking Mental Health Care
- Despite millennial stereotypes, burnout just as bad for Gen X doctors in training
Comment: The COVID-19 pandemic is trapping doctors in a previously unimaginable pressure cooker seemingly engineered as an ideal recipe for producing burnout. - Hire a 'Burnout' Officer to Help Physicians: Report
Excerpt: “To combat the crisis of physician burnout, every major healthcare organization in the United States should appoint an executive-level wellness officer …” - Burnout Rises Above 50% in Some Specialties, New Survey Shows
- Burnout Starts Early, Especially in Some Specialties
- Facing Burnout the First Year of Residency
Comment: Most people who aspire to become physicians excel in answering questions. Here's one for ya: why, really, do you want to become a doctor? And another: do you really know what you're getting yourself into?
Medicine is a great career for robots, not for people who wish to fully maintain their humanity. It took many years after leaving clinical medicine to undo some of its effects, some of which I fear are indelible. Abuse a dog, and it may never be the same again; abuse a person, ditto.
A key to constantly evolving into a better person is to be kind to yourself and live a balanced life, which is virtually impossible if you put patients first and keep your nose to the grindstone constantly learning.
By the way, doctors are kidding themselves—and essentially defrauding their patients—if they think the spectrum of learning during medical school and residency are sufficient fundamentals upon which to optimally augment patient health. I've spent more time before and after medical school learning crucial facets of health ignored by healthcare practitioners, and the deeper I dig, the more I realize I am nowhere near close to identifying all of the myriad factors that unquestionably impact health. Within the past year, for example, I added more to one of my health books, expanding it from 550 pages to now over 1400 and constantly growing, with it densely packed with information I would have figuratively given my right arm to know decades ago. - Association of Clinical Specialty With Symptoms of Burnout and Career Choice Regret Among US Resident Physicians
Comment: 45.2% of second-year resident physicians reported symptoms of burnout; career choice regret occurred in 14.1%. In my experience working with more experienced ER doctors, virtually all regretted choosing a medical career. - This surgeon loves her job. But it's killing her. She quit. She didn't love her job; she hated it.
- Burnout, depression can affect ophthalmology residents, study finds
Comment: Interesting because ophthalmology is considered one of the cushier specialties. - June 3, 2022: Doctor's 'mood' likely to increase their risk of being sued
Excerpt: “A new study finds doctor's 'mood' is affecting their work and chances of medical negligence.” - Professional Loneliness and the Loss of the Doctors’ Dining Room
- Sam Sinai, PhD student at Harvard University: Why I became a computer scientist instead of a doctor
- Med Student Suicide, Depression: National Response Needed
- Depression, anxiety high in graduate students, survey shows
Comment: Gee whiz, I wonder why? Might a balanced life be important to physical and mental health? - New doctors' intense and changing schedules take a toll on sleep, activity and mood
- Workplace stress can take a toll on your brain surgeon, too: A new study by the Keck School of Medicine of USC finds that two-thirds of neurosurgeons experience burnout during training
- Ending Resident Suicides Starts With More Humane Training
- UA study reveals Arizona EMTs face 39-percent greater risk of suicide
- National study confirms nurses at higher risk of suicide than general population
- April 14, 2021: Suicide among female nurses is double that of the general female population
- August 5, 2023: ‘Renowned’ NYC Cancer Doctor Kills Her Infant and Herself
- June 29, 2022: Study reveals the job problems contributing to physician suicide
- Do doctors have the worst job in America?
- Why Doctors Are Drowning in Medical School Debt: A resident physician investigates the causes of skyrocketing tuition
- Physician burnout in small practices is dramatically lower than national average
- Harvard Business Review August 22, 2022: 3 Types of Burnout, and How to Overcome Them
- Medical errors may stem more from physician burnout than unsafe health care settings
- Wired September 27, 2022: The Unlikely Cure for Burnout? A Second Job: “Overemployment” sounds like more of the same old grind, but its underlying philosophy is critical of work.
Comment: In my experience, it helps to have a second or third job in another occupation, not just working more hours at, say, two different emergency departments. - Changing diagnosis codes will challenge emergency medicine
Comment: American doctors are besieged with challenges faster than they can adapt to them; this is just one of the many problems they face. If you read between the lines, a clear message is evident: if you want a reasonably stress-free life, medicine isn't the career for you.
Surmounting the inherent challenges of medicine should be enough, but for American docs, the nightmare is just beginning. My advice? Read my LinkedIn article $70,000 per year, start now (its title was intentionally understated; you could earn more than most physicians and surgeons). Then put your feet up and really think about what I said and whether you want to beat yourself up to get “MD” after your name, or whether you want comparable income much sooner with markedly fewer hassles.
The alternative career options I suggested are less prestigious, adding yet another benefit—that will seem like a non sequitur unless you've read my article on how social rejection boosts motivation to excel in extraordinary ways. If you are truly smart enough to be a good doctor, you can do much more to help folks by inventing solutions to problems. People could be considerably happier and live more enjoyable lives but the joy they could have is robbed by problems that just pile up: the bane of the modern world that's bubbling with apps but not good ideas.
Good ideas solve problems in novel ways. For example, I wanted something better than antibiotics (I mentioned their numerous drawbacks in Best Shark Tank Product Ever?), so I created devices that cure certain infections much faster and more reliably than antibiotics and sold that technology to a friend of Bill Gates who owns a company that also invested in some of my other ideas.
I've used my germ-killing devices for years to knock out infections that antibiotics do little or nothing for. It's never failed, and along the way I found that it works better than anything else to control a very common problem and seems to rapidly accelerate healing of chronic wounds. While that device is good, it doesn't begin to get my pulse racing; what I'm working on now will make your eyes pop out, solving what is unquestionably one of the biggest problems in the world in very surprising ways.
Thus more people should be doing what I'm doing. If they did, we'd need markedly fewer doctors, and people would be healthier, happier, smarter, and more attractive with more free time and more money to spend on fun instead of healthcare that's bankrupting us but not making us very healthy. - Emergency care doctors not getting sufficient 'down time', new study shows
- Road To Nowhere Part 1: Negative Outcomes On The Path To Discovering A Post-Medical Career
- How to be a Real Emergency Physician: An Open Letter to the Recently Graduated and the Seasoned Veteran
- 6 MDs Who Quit Clinical Practice and Never Looked Back
- When a Physician Leaves, We All Lose
- The Loneliness of Being a Physician
- Employees of medical centers report high stress, negative health behaviors
- Medical students become less empathic toward patients throughout medical school
- November 7, 2022: ‘I don't want this kind of life’: graduate students question career options
Comment: Prospective physicians should ponder whether they truly want lives as miserable as those of current doctors. Judging by my experience and that of other docs I know, money isn't a good antidote to toxic lifestyles. - Doctor Achieves Lifelong Dream of Quitting Medicine Forever
Comment: Satire, but if most doctors could feasibly leave medicine, most would in a heartbeat. Being a doctor is one of the best jobs in the world, with priceless rewards (not money, BTW) but more pain and stress than anyone should have to endure. If someone inflicted comparable misery on you, it would be a felony. - Over 40 percent of GPs intend to quit within five years: New survey
- Should Physicians Educate Patients via Social Media?
Comment: Medical ethicist Art Caplan, Ph.D. says yes. I said yes decades ago. - October 15, 2019: Veterinarians — beset by stress, death and debt — are dying by suicide at high rates
- August 29, 2022: Burnout takes heavy financial toll on veterinary medicine
- Time magazine September 12, 2019: Veterinarians Face Unique Issues That Make Suicide One of the Profession's Big Worries
- May 26, 2021: Alarming suicide rates reflective of stresses felt by veterinarians
- January 13, 2022: Many veterinarians struggle with suicidal thoughts
- May 23, 2023: A mental-health crisis is gripping science — toxic research culture is to blame: With researchers reporting high rates of anxiety and depression, calls are growing to fundamentally change science before it's too late.
- June 28, 2022: How to deal with stress while working in a demanding industry: For high-achieving professionals working in competitive fields, it's important to find the best way to preserve your mental resilience.
Comment: Overly simple tips. There is a time and a place for kindergarten, but also graduate school. Pop quiz: regarding the epidemic of stress and burnout, do we really need more elementary coverage? - December 14, 2022: New study reveals how entrepreneurs avoid burnout and accumulate happiness
- Time magazine January 5, 2023: She's a Happiness Professor. Her Lessons Are Helping Her Beat Burnout
Excerpt: “There's no single explanation for the rampant unhappiness, but Santos says some of it goes back to the way humans are wired. … Or, your brain convinces you that you need a fancy job, a huge salary, or a blue check mark on Instagram to be happy, when these external accomplishments often bring only fleeting satisfaction. … When Santos introduced her course, Psychology and the Good Life, in 2018, it quickly became the most popular in Yale's history.”
Comment: Yet she burned out in spite of it. Her solution? A sabbatical in which “she spends her days podcasting, going to Monday movie nights with friends, learning to knit, and indulging her love of music by booting up her old PlayStation to play Guitar Hero.”
Most likely, you're not a professor with a sabbatical in your contract. Replicate what she did, or something like it, and you will very likely end up homeless, starving, and perhaps dead. Main Street Americans need more practical happiness lessons but the experts they typically turn to — primary care physicians, psychiatrists, and psychologists — usually pursue happiness in the same dysfunctional ways as everyone else, and rarely achieve it.
I've had an exceptionally challenging and stressful life, so extreme that a psychologist friend thinks it would be great fodder for a Hollywood movie. In spite of that pressure cooker, or perhaps because of it, I learned antidotes to anxiety, depression, and burnout that you won't find in the happiness course from the burned-out professor. I put those tips, and other tidbits worth their weight in gold, in an upcoming mega-book that is currently 4331 pages and growing daily. - Know Yourself Better by Writing What Pops into Your Head: The exercise of writing down unfiltered thoughts enhances self-knowledge
- 'I've Had It With Medicine!' 16 Options for Second Careers
Comment: Make that 17: inventing. :-) I can't prematurely disclose what game-changing ideas I have up my sleeve just to appease skeptics and small-minded folks imbued with a crab mentality who don't think there will ever be another Steve Jobs, but when my prototyped and proven inventions are marketed, I will succeed in helping billions of people now and in the future in addition to making my investors fabulously wealthy.
My LinkedIn tagline has the seemingly audacious claim that my big ideas “could make my investors richer than Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined.” That seems like a pipe dream, and had someone told me five years ago that I'd soon have ideas that valuable, I would have laughed. But after decades of trying to come up with even a single big idea, I quickly had a small flood of them, some of which do things that seem utterly impossible, yet I know how to make them practical and easy to produce and use.
I will enrich my investors while saving consumers a boatload of money. To understand how that's possible, history gives other precedents for how significant innovations can create vast fortunes while benefiting consumers. My inventions will make people happier, healthier, and more attractive; they'll save time and energy, and give more pleasure than you ever thought possible.
I never intended to address drug addiction, but as a fortuitous side effect of one of my inventions (not its primary application), some people addicted to drugs or at risk for that will instead use my product so they could, if they wished, experience rapturous pleasure every waking minute of their lives, without harming their health or society, as the repercussions of drug abuse do. Yup, I turned even a frigging side effect into a miracle!The moral of the story is that if you truly want to help people, as most people say when they want to become doctors, you might do enormously more by not practicing clinical medicine. The catch is that there's a well-worn path to becoming a doc. It's arduous, but the road map is clear: just follow the directions and — presto! — you'll arrive at your destination if you have The Right Stuff: enough mental horsepower and figurative gas in your tank.
Unfortunately, the path is much less clear on how to become an inventor with moonshot ideas that pan out. Going from dunce to doctor, as I once did (see above) was a breeze compared with the difficulty of morphing from a doctor to an inventor with ideas that solve some of mankind's most pressing problems and help companies leapfrog ahead of their competition.
In this and my other ER site, I gave various tips for augmenting intelligence, most of which are easy though not always quick. Many of my serendipitously discovered tips for boosting creativity are even easier (though so abstruse virtually no one knows them), but some of them require sacrifices few people would endure. The latter are the ones likely most responsible for my big ideas, but without such breakthroughs, you can still make a decent living and help people by inventing. So before you commit to a medical career, consider inventing. Had someone given me that advice when I was young, they would have done me a huge favor.
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