Nearly half of US doctors struggle with burnout: study

[steve2470]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/21/us-doctors-burnout-idUSBRE87J0RJ20120821

(Reuters) - Job burnout strikes doctors more often than it does other employed people in the United States, according to a national survey that included more than 7,000 doctors.

More than four in 10 U.S. physicians said they were emotionally exhausted or felt a high degree of cynicism, or "depersonalization," toward their patients, said researchers whose findings appeared in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

"The high rate of burnout has consequences not only for the individual physicians, but also for the patients they are caring for," said Tait Shanafelt of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who led the research.

Previous studies have shown that burned-out doctors are more prone to thinking about suicide and to making medical errors than their peers, Shanafelt added.

[TruthAnalyzed]

1. In my immediate family

we have a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, and a professor.

I'm the poor one in the family, but also the one with more time at home, and less stress

ETA: Not poor, and don't mean to trivialize what many people are suffering through... just meant that compared to the rest of my family. We're actually middle-class, and have everything we really want.

[Fumesucker]

2. Being a stand-in for God is a tough row to hoe..

I wonder what the burnout rate is for physicians in the British NHS?

[HiPointDem]

3. 'emotionally exhausted or felt a high degree of cynicism, or "depersonalization," toward patients'

doesn't surprise me a bit.

number one is thanks to privatization of medicine & hmos since the 70s, they have to see too fucking many patients, for too short a time, to see them as human or to really know them & their case in depth. it's deeply depersonalizing, and that's really bad news for healthcare.

it's assembly-line for-profit medicine, it's the "speed-up" technique of capital to extract more labor & profit from workers, same tactic as used on the assembly line.

[no_hypocrisy]

4. IMO it's because medicine is more of a business than 40 years ago.

My father had a small practice less than a mile from the house. He knew all his patients like family or friends. Got in at 9 and left at 6 at latest. Sometimes he did hospital rounds before the office, sometimes after dinner. And made housecalls in the middle of the night. He didn't have patients every 15 minutes. He had them come in and jawbone with him. That way he knew their diets, their exercise (e.g., sports), their family situations, their employment, even whether they had pets.

He never felt burnout. He loved being a doctor. He loved his patients and they adored him. He had a very large geriatric clientele and always treated each patient with great respect and warmth.

And he kept medicine sequestered from the business of running the practice. He had both a part time accountant and a wonderful office manager who looked after the books. I doubt my father knew how much money was available at any given time except for April 15.

[reformist2]

5. So many overworked people, so many unemployed looking for work...

Maybe a thread about doctors isn't the best place to bring this up, but isn't there something inherently absurd about this picture of all these workers killing themselves to make six figure salaries, and then people wonder why there aren't enough jobs to go around?

[NNN0LHI]

6. It is frustration more than anything else

Last edited Tue Aug 21, 2012, 07:28 AM - Edit history (1)

My mothers doctors have been trying to treat her for decades. First for severe depression. Now for Alzheimers. She is convinced she can pray away such maladies.

So far she has driven my father into an early grave and is now working full time to do the same to my brother and I. She will probably get my brother.

But she isn't doing it to me.

Don

[Daemonaquila]

7. Now replace the word "doctor" with...

... "attorney," "architect," "engineer," etc. - ANY professional required to exercise independence and creativity, but usually working for a larger firm or practice. The reason is simple. In the 1980s, 15 patients per day was a full day for a doctor. Now, they're expected to push though 40. Attorney (and other) billable hour quotas have likewise been rising. All that matters to many employers is making more money with the same staff, and the culture, for decades now, has been "Those spoiled people can squeeze out just an extra X% more hours. For a year or two, maybe - but not rising for 20+years.

[Zalatix]

8. Behold the Cult of Productivity.

Everyone worships the Demigod named Productivity. More work from fewer people. If you oppose this culture you are accused of opposing the father of the Demigod of Productivity - the God known as Progress. That makes you a BLASPHEMER.

So go on, America, worship the great God named Progress and its Demigod son Productivity, and we'll just keep seeing more shit like this.

[KharmaTrain]

9. I Saw This First Hand...

My late father was a physician for 60 years. His practice was his life and his patients were his family. He began as an old-fashioned GP who actually did housecalls and maintained his practice until a month before he passed in his mid 80s. Ironically he had patients that were older than him. That said, his devotion came at a steep price. There were several times where he suffered severe bouts of depression. This occured when he got too involved in a case and he couldn't find a way to cure or fix the problem. The loss of his mother led to being institutionalized for several weeks (this was the mid 60s) and he suffered from various mental disorders for the remainder of his life.