I had been hearing so much about burnout in medicine; and one day, I realized it had crept up on me. It began at my mother’s funeral, when an acquaintance, a former family friend, approached me asking me to examine her painful toe. I tried to avoid her, yet I could not say no. Through my grief and exhaustion, conditioned by years of striving to live a life of purpose, …
A doctor’s struggle with burnout and boundaries
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Certified coach Michael Carlini discusses his article “Why physicians with ADHD are burning out.” Michael explains how high-IQ physicians often mask their ADHD symptoms through hyper-organization, perfectionism, and hyperfocus, which allows them …
Why physicians with ADHD are struggling with burnout despite success [PODCAST]
These days, getting spun out into a state of worry and panic is just a click away: Turn on any device for constant updates on the chaos around us.
Adding to this, on a personal level, the last six years have been the most difficult and transformative period of my life. I had never imagined that I would experience and recover from the darkness of depression and suicidality six years ago, …
Unhooking from the ego in medicine
Behind every prescription safely dispensed stands a pharmacist making dozens of clinical decisions under mounting pressure. What happens when that pressure becomes unbearable? When the professionals who are the last line of defense against medication harm are pushed to their breaking point, patient safety breaks with them. This crisis is real and it is often invisible.
The invisible epidemic
Surveys and workplace reports repeatedly show that large numbers of pharmacists experience burnout …
Why pharmacist burnout is a patient safety issue
Ever been so tired you forgot your own name? I remember a junior doctor on strike in London who told me exactly that. Thirty-six hours awake, stumbling into the children’s ward, staring at a prescription pad. “I couldn’t even remember my own name,” he said, “let alone the right antibiotic dose.”
That was not about wages. That was about survival, his and the children’s.
Yet the story always gets told the same …
Why doctors strike: a matter of survival
Everywhere in American medicine today, you hear the word leadership. Hospitals advertise leadership programs. AMCs hold leadership retreats. Colleagues are urged to “develop as leaders.” Yet when you talk to practicing doctors (the ones actually seeing patients), most will tell you all they want is to do their work, fairly scheduled, with decent colleagues, and without interference.
That is the paradox of the physician leader. Everyone talks about leadership, but almost …
Stop trying to lead doctors like corporate employees
The 9/22 White House press conference regarding acetaminophen raises two serious concerns. First, the scientific accuracy of the purported link between acetaminophen and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is dubious. Additionally, the norms of public communication concerning whether a President should offer medical advice existed for good reason. The heads of CMS, NIH, and FDA were present, but did not dispute in real time the essential claim that Tylenol causes autism.
Second, …
The false link between Tylenol and autism
I am writing this on a flight, somewhere between Los Angeles and Boston. Next to me, a young couple is tending to their ten-month-old baby: passing a bottle, bouncing her when she fusses, trading weary but tender smiles. Their world is diapers and nap schedules, the endless rhythm of caregiving.
My world today looks very different. I am taking my youngest child to college. With this trip, all three of my …
The paradox of letting your children go
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Health care executive Sujay Jadhav discusses his article “How AI is revolutionizing health care through real-world data.” Sujay explains how artificial intelligence tools like machine learning and natural language processing are turning …
How AI is transforming health care with real-world data insights [PODCAST]
We were walking up the fairway on the ninth hole when one of my patients asked, “Larry, when should I come in for my annual?” I had a seven-iron in hand, breeze at my back, and I answered without thinking: “Doesn’t matter.” He looked at me like I had just duffed a wedge. To him, it sounded like I did not care. In a way, I suppose I mishit that …
Rethinking the value of the annual physical
Health care often talks about burnout as if it were a recent discovery. But for many clinicians, the exhaustion they feel did not begin with them. It was inherited, passed down through a system that normalizes overwork, silence, and sacrifice as the price of practicing medicine.
Every generation of providers has heard the same message: This is just how it is. Long shifts, missed meals, unsafe staffing ratios, and silence in …
The generational trauma of the health care system
Burnout isn’t a personal shortcoming; it’s a system warning. A peer-reviewed Annals of Internal Medicine cost estimate pegs the annual bill for physician burnout near $4.6 billion in turnover and reduced clinical time, an operational risk with human consequences. As an executive who works across clinical and administrative teams, I see this as both a human tragedy and an operational failure that demands leadership attention. The good news: There …
Leadership levers to reduce burnout
I am the mother of a 37-year-old son diagnosed with autism and Crohn’s disease. He also has serious intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), requiring round-the-clock care and support. I also have a medical history of PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome) and took fertility medication to conceive him. For years, I have watched the autism diagnosis rate climb while public discourse remained fixated on single causes or stigmatizing narratives. But we are …
A mother’s question about PCOS and her son’s autism
As a pharmacist, I have spent years behind the counter filling prescriptions, answering questions, and giving quick consultations. Most of my days felt routine: scanning barcodes, checking drug interactions, and moving from one patient to the next. But one encounter changed the way I saw my profession forever.
It was a quiet afternoon when an elderly woman walked into the pharmacy. She handed me a prescription for blood pressure medication, but …
A pharmacist’s lesson in patient care
When a teenage boy develops sudden testicular pain, it should always be treated as an emergency. The most urgent concern is testicular torsion, where the spermatic cord twists and cuts off blood supply to the testicle. In these cases, every hour counts; waiting too long can mean permanent damage, loss of the testicle, and even future fertility problems.
Torsion happens most often in boys and adolescents because the testicles grow …
Why sudden testicular pain is an emergency
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Pediatrician Kelly Curtin-Hallinan discusses her article “My improbable survival of stage 4 cancer.” Kelly shares her year-long journey of facing a dire diagnosis, enduring rounds of tests, managing the anxiety of waiting …
Living with the uncertainty of surviving stage 4 cancer [PODCAST]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I cared for a patient in the intensive care unit whose condition was critical. When I asked how he was feeling, he said, “Doctor, I am not afraid. My family is praying for me, and I believe God will give me strength.” Despite receiving the best medical interventions available, it was clear that his faith, cultural practices, and the support of his family played an undeniable …
The role of faith and culture in patient recovery
Kratom (Mitragyna speciosa) has become a topic of significant debate among clinicians, policymakers, and the public due to differing views on its safety, pharmacology, and regulatory requirements. A recent article raises important concerns about kratom’s pharmacological actions, potential for addiction, psychiatric risks, and regulatory challenges. Although the goal of protecting public health is admirable, it is crucial that discussions around kratom are rooted in current scientific evidence and avoid …
The case for regulating, not banning, kratom
In the late 1990s, Yahoo dominated the internet by organizing websites. Human editors manually reviewed, categorized, and arranged them into a hierarchical directory, essentially a digital Yellow Pages. This worked while the web was small, but the approach couldn’t scale. Google took a radically different path. Instead of relying on human judgment, they built algorithms to crawl, index, and rank pages based on links and relevance. This allowed them to …
Health care is having its Yahoo moment
In the grand edifice of American medicine, where the Enlightenment’s promise of rational progress once shone brightly, a shadow now lengthens across the corridors: the tyranny of the metric. Conceived in the spirit of Taylorism’s efficiency and Deming’s quality control, these numerical arbiters were meant to elevate the healer’s art, transforming subjective judgment into objective excellence. Yet, as with so many well-intentioned intrusions of bureaucracy into human affairs, they have …
The measure of a doctor, the misery of a patient
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