The snide tone of the first sentence alone was offensive enough to almost make me quit reading. I cant say I have experienced any major failures in my life and I fail to see how this makes me an inferior human being. The article is clearly written from the perspective of someone who has no experience in the world we, as medical trainees, experience daily. I would agree that many employers treat their interns and junior staff just as poorly as residents and medical students are treated by some staff physicians and other members of the medical care team (nurses, consultants, etc.). However, the reasons for burnout are vast and have little to do with the lack of gold stars we receive. I have been lucky enough to receive a number of positive and reassuring evaluations from the attending physicians I have worked with, but this isnt protection from the inevitable degree of burnout we all experience. Imagine making yourself available for a 26-hour period quite literally every 4 days; never knowing when youll be able to leave for the evening; finding a niche that inspires and motivates you but knowing that your job prospects are, contrary to popular belief, incredibly poor; living in just as competitive of an environment once you get into medical school as you did before it; treating patients whom the health and social systems have failed and who will inevitably be back within a week and knowing you are unable to help them; knowing on a daily basis that your skill and decision-making may be the difference between life and death in every sense of the phrase; knowing that you have the treatment that might improve a patients condition but they fail to listen to you (continuing to smoke for example), or worse yet, they cannot afford it. The reasons for burnout as a medical trainee or physician are as innumerable as they are personal. Nevertheless, medicine can be an incredibly rewarding career and I am very happy to have the opportunity to be a part of it, even though my chances of developing burnout come down to the flip of a coin. I will embrace the challenges ahead of me as a chance to grow stronger and more resilient. However, I am incredibly offended that an individual, who has no experience in my situation, would have the audacity to claim that my burnout comes down to my sense of entitlement. I am equally irritated that the author would claim that we are losing a lot of talent when straight-A students choose medicine. I am a consumer of health care just as much as I am a provider, and I can tell you, there are no other people to whom I would rather entrust my life than to my straight-A colleagues around the world.
Posted on: Wed, 16 Jul 2014 03:53:50 +0000
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