The darker side of being a doctor

ferrule

Friends in medicine often mention the constant emotional drain from dealing with suffering and death. Takes a serious toll.

osmukka

Healthcare is the last industry that should be privatized. It should be for the public good rather than for the profit of few.

lotsofpulp

>You might ask, why can’t you work less? It’s not as easy as that. If I decide to work less, who is going to cover the hospital? If the hospital aren’t employing other doctors, we can’t allow patients to go uncovered. I accept the fact that I have a duty of care to be on call. Yes, you can allow patients to go uncovered. This hero mentality is what leads the bosses to not properly staff and the politicians to not properly fund in the first place. It is not an individual’s responsibility to correct a societal failure by hurting themselves.

khalic

I remember some friends working in intensive care during the pandemic, I'll never forget their facial expressions after these 24hr shifts... I really wish someone would come up with a better way to do this

simonw

Wow. > I had worked in a hospital network that covered 4 campuses and drove 500kms a week when covering these sites. I had worked in a hospital where I didn’t get home for days at a time, sleeping overnight in hospital quarters, outpatient clinic benches and in my car. As a patient, I'd like the person performing surgery on me to be well-rested! It gets worse: > I used to be able to arrange the operating list because I know that some operations take longer than others. But now, the bookings office determine that that all my tonsillectomies take 14 minutes because that’s the average time recorded on the computer. The moment I scrub in, the timer starts. The moment I unscrub timer stops. Click. Click. Click. Because the theatre bookings does not take into account the interpreter time, pre-med period or transfer to ICU, the list is running late. The nurse in charge is breathing down my neck to finish on time. And yet somehow that 14 minute tonsillectomy gets billed at ~$10,000. This seems to me like a system that has been hyperoptimized in a way that grinds down the participants.

estearum

(speaking from US): The reality is we need more doctors. A lot more. There's no solution other than training a lot, lot, lot, lot more doctors. Their salaries need to be lower, training needs to be cheaper and faster, and we need a lot more of them.

hutattedonmyarm

In the same vein: there’s the fantastic book This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay

asdefghyk

It seems there needs to be more doctors to help reduce the insane workload. Must be lots burn out suffered ? by Drs?

carver2941

Makes you wonder if they face similar on-call burnout but with actual life-or-death stakes. Way more intense than a buggy deploy.

ransom1538

"I have lost control of my days. I had worked in a hospital where I was oncall 24/7, 12 days out of 14. I had fortnightly weekends off." Medicine is ran by a bunch of creepy boards. "ACGME Review Committee for Dermatology." For example gets together and votes on how many Dermatologist we get, fun fact it doesn't go up much. $They were so kind to add 400 more Dermatologist$ in the past decade to the student pipeline.$ What could the rea$son be? What I would do if you are a doctor and don't hate humans - ask these boards to let more people in (hopefully Americans, but Americans have an uphill climb getting accepted with the flood of fraud applications from around the world).

underdeserver

It's ridiculous. We need more doctors.

panick21_

How the US does scheduling is kind of insane. Doctors like pilots (and truck drivers in Europe) should have clear rules about how long they work with rest periods and so on. Giving people 24h shifts is nonsensical and insane.

1970-01-01

This very much points to the administrative side causing the damage. The overall toolset is broken and nobody is fixing.

exdoctormachina

I had a patient who tried and failed to use the legal system to extort me. Extremely frivolous. I'm in the process of leaving the profession. I don't feel guilty for the patients who will be left behind, they voted for this.

kiln_ash

Friends in residency describe it as a grind that breaks people, not just physically but emotionally too. The toll is immense.

ratmice

Feels like a hundred years later we're still cursed by the cocaine addiction of Dr. William Stewart Halsted

robertcope

I feel like a very similar article could be written by a teacher.

logicallee

I'm not suicidal and have never been suicidal or thought about suicide. I'm happy and in a good mood every day. If someone is thinking about suicide please reach out to me: rviragh@gmail.com I'll listen to your issues and concerns and we will find a better solution for you.

kunley

Same corporate-greedy shit as everywhere but harder, because it's dealing with suffering and death.

jcft2

Are these problems consistent all over the world, or are they particularly severe in certain countries? I assume there are many studies of this already so it would be good to understand whether this is a problem that has a solution.