The Dark Side of Doctoring
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The Dark Side of Doctoring
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Re: The Dark Side of Doctoring
#2Dr. Pamela Wible has long been a very loud voice on the issue of doctor suicide. Check out her website http://www.idealmedicalcare.org, which includes a link to her TED talk on the subject.
Re: The Dark Side of Doctoring
#3The FAA enforces work limitations on pilots, but we schedule our health care workers like this? How are there not even civil cases against errors caused by this kind of administrative foolishness? Overworking doctors like this is insane.
Re: The Dark Side of Doctoring
#4This sounds like unrelenting Taylorism, trying to scrape too little butter on too much toast.
If all this administrative work needs to be done, do surgeons necessarily need to do it? Can we hire more clerical specialists to offload that work onto, or more PAs or RNs to handle less specialized work?
A few measly hundred million in the federal budget could probably be dredged up to subsidize medical school tuition and take some of the sting out of the long, expensive marathon of medical schooling, maybe?
Re: The Dark Side of Doctoring
#5It would appear that the relentless dehumanization of the skilled laborer by business interests has finally spread to the professional classes.
I can't even recall how many young software companies I have sent my resume to that turned out to be in the business of building software for insurers and hospital systems that end up telling physicians how to do their jobs. Of course, the metrics all back this up as a solid plan that increases productivity and reduces expensive errors and negative outcomes due to inattention, but I know it just has to suck for the docs to have to experience exactly the same thing that has already happened to most other jobs.
Re: The Dark Side of Doctoring
#6It's worth noting that the incredible success of Epic EMR software is because it tightly controls all of the administrative billing issues, NOT because it makes clinician's lives easier. There are endless check boxes in Epic and each site has its own interface. It's a huge mess and difficult to navigate...but arguably still better than the other vendors.
Re: The Dark Side of Doctoring
#7Where does the AMA stand on this?
Re: The Dark Side of Doctoring
#8Why continue in a job that sucks that hard? Is it the money? The prestige? Family expectations? It seems like a terrible way to live.
Re: The Dark Side of Doctoring
#9Why continue in a job that sucks that hard? Is it the money? The prestige? Family expectations? It seems like a terrible way to live.
As a first guess, the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt that were incurred becoming educated and licensed as a surgeon in the first place.
Re: The Dark Side of Doctoring
#10Why continue in a job that sucks that hard? Is it the money? The prestige? Family expectations? It seems like a terrible way to live.
The doctors I know, despite the toil and suffering, really, really like being doctors. They like what they do for other people. To a one, they are more than capable enough to jump into any other career, likely more profitable (when seen as a ratio of time/money or pain/money at least).
This isn't true of all doctors, but you'll probably find that ones that suffer through like what the author (Dr. Levi) discusses find that their practice is a calling, not an occupation or job. As a calling, it's part of their identity, giving up on it just doesn't make sense to them.