I entered my doctor's exam room worried about my health. I exited worried about his.
A lack of pressure when he placed the stethoscope over my heart. His ghost-eyed look when I spoke. His nearly inaudible voice. All of this registered as the most severe depletion of spirit — or what is sometimes and inadequately referred to as burnout — I'd seen in one of my doctors. And I've seen a lot of doctors over the years.
When I was 32, I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Lucky enough to survive, I spent several years housebound as I grappled with the fallout from chemotherapy. Tanking blood pressure levels. Hours spent lying on my hardwood floor to avert blacking out instead of legging it out the door to work. Innumerable texts to family and friends that started with "V sorry to cancel."
Trying to identify why my pre-cancer health had not returned and how to get it back, I gunned it to doctors' offices with an I'll-do-anything-to-get-better mindset.
I believe that the diagnoses and treatments I ultimately and thankfully received would have been made years earlier had my doctors been empowered to dedicate themselves to my case with a singular focus instead of being pulled in disparate directions. In a nutshell, I was unable to get well while my doctors' wells were empty.
Although faced with what three primary care physicians described in a recent First Opinion as "the corporatization and bureaucratization of medical practice, which impinges on our professional autonomy, leaving us less flexibility to do what needs to be done for each patient," most of the doctors I saw have done what Dr. Danielle Ofri referred to in her nerve-hitting New York Times op-ed last month: "An overwhelming majority do the right thing for their patients, even at a high personal cost."
More ….
https://www.statnews.com/2019/07/26/physician-burnout-and-medical-breakthroughs-a-patients-story/
