Who Gets Burnout?

What power do we have to survive burnout? Some folks study “resilience,” the ability to withstand trauma. Like foreign medical graduates, who have come — maybe — from war-torn countries. Or former military docs, docs who have seen combat.

They are actually telling me that a doctor is more likely to avoid succumbing to burnout if their life has been rotten beforehand.

AAAAUUUUGGGHHHH!

But wait, there’s more.

Mindfulness meditation? Although it is popular, counting your own breath and being a fly-on-the-wall observing your own life are, although researched and found helpful, a week and poor substitute for faith. A coherent and mature view of the universe that often includes some deity or force. I am, I think, old fashioned here.

Nurturing colleagues? — a good prescription for a residency program. In my reality of training and practice, this has never happened. Medicine often forces its practioners to make definitive decisions with insufficent data and to project invulnerable authority. Training this sort of population to be nurturing to each other is pretty damned hard, to put it mildly.

Solutions have been proposed by people who are designated to provide solutions. The problem is that I am skeptical so I look in my soul to find out why.

There is a central paradox here. All the criticized bureaucratic demands on physicians bring about dehumanization of patients. It is tough to stop the system from dehumanizing physicians as well. Society at-large cares less about people and dehumanizes us all in many ways. Put the system in a crearer, bigger conxtext.

This is a job for real humans.